Burl reviews Isabel! (1968)

 

Eh bien, c’est Burl! Ha ha, I’m here to talk about a picture I saw on TV long ago, back when the Canadian TV stations were playing any and all Canadian movies they could find, over and over again! That’s how I first saw pictures like Rituals, Prom Night, and Meatballs! But this movie is another thing entirely: it’s the moody exercise in Gaspé-Gothic known to all as Isabel!

Ha ha! The star of Isabel is of course Isabel herself, played by Geneviève Bujold from Earthquake and Dead Ringers, who was married at the time to this film's writer-director, Paul Almond! Bujold plays a young Montreal-dwelling woman who, as the story begins, is on a train back to her little hometown on the Gaspé coast to see her dying mother! But she arrives in her curiously Anglo community a little too late, and is left to bumble around in a big dark farmhouse with her uncle, who continually issues thunderingly obvious hints that he would like her to stay and cook his meals and help out on the farm! The uncle, played by Gerard Parkes from The Pyx and Spasms, is plagued by troubles of the heart - physical, not emotional ones, ha ha - but like many old rural types, is not taking his encroaching decrepitude with quite as much grace as he might!

Isabel, meanwhile, resists his entreaties, claiming she needs to get back to her job and life in the big city! But she keeps receiving, or not receiving, letters that one by one remove her reasons for leaving the Gaspé: her roommate, who may or may not also be her girlfriend (we are reminded of Theodora’s unseen roommate in The Haunting), is ghosting her, and her employer lets her go! Stewing in this death-cursed place, thinking about the drowning demises of her father and brother, and about the shell-shocked grandfather who went mad, ran around the town in his gas mask and eventually jumped into the spinning blade of a sawmill, or the young cousin who was evidently eaten by a pig, it's not surprising that she begins to have odd, troubling, ghostly visions! She has encounters with people such as the rugged Jason, played by Marc Strange from Run and Tommy Boy, who buys some of the uncle’s livestock and proves pleasant company to Isabel; a needy local called Herb, essayed by Al Waxman from Tulips, who exudes a date-rapey vibe he makes good on before the story's end; Isabel’s much older sister, who is also a sister in that she's a nun, but not a particularly sweet or friendly one; and, in my very favourite performance in the whole entire picture, a storekeeper played by J. Donald Dow! It broke my heart a bit when a voiceover flashback made him sound a bit creepy!

While there are plenty of details of farm-town society, including the inevitable fiddle dance, the picture is really about Isabel’s interior life and the threat of emotional disintegration as illustrated by horror tropes and spooky atmosphere and intimations of past abuse and trauma! In that respect it’s like a quieter Canadian version of Repulsion or Images, and though it would in all honesty be hard to classify Isabel as a horror picture, it nevertheless contains as many or more genuinely scary scenes than many avowed horror pictures do!

Some have complained that the movie is slow and boring, but I never found it so! Even in the less eventful passages there’s always the gorgeous cinematography of Georges Dufaux to admire, or the coastal early-spring atmosphere, or the strong acting, or the insanely cute Bujold herself, ha ha, whose look in this film very likely instilled my weakness for dark-haired pixie-cut gals! On the debit side there’s a convolutedness to the narrative and to the psychological landscape of the film that is never really worked out; and several scenes near the end are lacking in illumination of any kind! In this darkness it’s not always clear who’s who and what they’re doing, nor what, in the past, they may have done! And where things stand at the end? Ha ha, it’s anybody’s guess! Nevertheless, I enjoyed the picture immensely, and I believe that if you approach it in the right spirit and in the right mood, you will too! I give Isabel three booters!

Burl reviews The Town that Dreaded Sundown! (2014)

 

A shivery sunset to you, it’s Burl here with remake terror to review! Ha ha, and among the least likely horror works to be remade might be the films of Don Dohler or Bill Rebane or Larry Buchanan, but close behind that in the unlikelihood stakes are the films of Charles B. Pierce! Wait a minute, you say - did somebody remake Boggy Creek II… and the Legend Continues? Ha ha, nope! In fact it’s an all-new take on The Town that Dreaded Sundown!

The original picture, released in 1976, is probably remembered more for its poster, or at least the image on the Warner clamshell video release, than for anything else! But it was also an effective exploitation of a local spook-story, in a low-budget, regional sort of a way! The creepy headbag went a long mile to securing its place in the grindhouse pantheon, though, and in my childhood, thanks to that movie, I found even the name “Texarkana” to be inherently eerie! Ha ha, I still sort of do!

The original picture told the story of maniac who terrorized Texarkana in 1946, using a gun or a knife to kill habitués of the local Lovers’ Lane! This new version begins at the annual screening of the Charles B. Pierce picture in Texarkana, during which it is revealed that the killer, now presumably elderly, has returned to his old habits! And judging from his filthy jacket and workpant combo, and of course his headbag, he shops at the same outlet store Jason does! Ha ha! But is it really the same killer, who would now be so impossibly old he could barely wield a buck knife, let alone chase screaming teenagers through the woods with it; or is it someone related to the killer; or someone simply inspired by the movie itself; or, in a possibility brought up several times, some kind of blood-crazed supernatural boogeyman!

Well, the movie has an answer, though not one that will satisfy all viewers! It has other things to offer, of course: a highly stylized shooting approach that will impress some and put off others; some wince-inducing gore; and a game cast! The younger contingent of the cast all acquit themselves well as they try to evade the shootings and pokings, but there’s also a gallery of oldenbones, or relative oldenbones, that includes some surprisingly familiar faces! Veronica Cartwright from The Birds and Invasion of the Body Snatchers plays the lead girl’s granny, who decides that now is finally the time to up stakes and leave Texas, which she claims never to have done before despite living less than a kilometer from its border, ha ha; Edward Herrmann from The Lost Boys is a priest who’s strangely supportive of the murders; Anthony Anderson from The Departed, playing the Texas Ranger in charge of investigating the murders, gets a great blustery entrance but is given disappointingly little to do after that; Gary Cole from In the Line of Fire is a deputy, and Ed Lauter from Lassiter is the sheriff!

The picture works hard to be stylish, clever, and scary, and is successful only some of the time! I did like that they included Charles B. Pierece Jr., noted for his constant shirtlessness in Boggy Creek II, as a character who provides the leads with his own theories on the case! The long take that opens the movie is impressive in a mechanical sort of a way, and some of the lighting has a pleasingly Bava-esque quality, but too often the pointlessly canted angles distract from the atmosphere, ha ha! And the concluding reel of the picture is very familiar, and therefore lacks the impact found in earlier spook-scenes! Still, a noble effort made with enough verve and intelligence to make it worthwhile and not just another sequel/remake/reboot that wastes everybody’s time! I give The Town that Dreaded Sundown two death-recliners!

Burl reviews L.A. Story! (1991)

 

A jolly Left Coast hello to you all, it’s Burl! Ha ha, I’m here to review a movie I remember seeing when it came out! I saw it on a date with a girl named Catherine, and I think it was the only movie date we went on! It’s a romantic movie, though, and as I recall it was a reasonably romantic date as well! But the particulars have been lost to time and to the hazy vicissitudes of memory, and so all I really have left of that date is the movie we went to see: L.A. Story!

Steve Martin from ¡Three Amigos! and Planes, Trains & Automobiles is the star of the picture, ha ha, and he also wrote it! He plays Harris Telemacher, the wackiest weatherman in Southern California, and wouldn’t you know it, he’s vaguely dissatisfied with his life! Fortunately the magic of Los Angeles is such that its freeway information signs are sentient, benevolent entities who live only to help well-heeled but vaguely dissatisfied white guys with their minor problems!

One such signpost stops him on the side of the road one night and informs the befuddled weatherman that it wants to help, and that he should look out for the weather! It also delivers unto him a riddle, ha ha! From here the movie becomes a combo plate of absurdist satire and yearning romance regularly infused with Enya tunes and the incessant twirling of Sarah Jessica Parker, who is even more footloose here than she was in Footloose!

The principal object of Telemacher’s ardor is Victoria Tennant, who co-starred with Martin in All of Me, and, I think, married him! She plays a flibbertigibbet journalist in town to do a story on the city and its people! There’s a romantic quillici, or at least a perceived one, between her, Telemacher, the flax-brained earth child played by Parker, and a good-natured Brit essayed by Richard E. Grant from Withnail and I! Marilu Henner from Johnny Dangerously is in there too I guess, as Telemacher’s ladyfriend who turns out to be having an affair with his agent, played by Kevin Pollack from Grumpy Old Men! “Ha ha, I thought they were only supposed to take ten percent!” Telemacher grouses!

The name “Harris Telemacher,” which is a little bit weird and a bit stuffy too, gives you an idea of the comedic tone of the movie: it has one foot in the goofology of, say, The Man With Two Brains, and the other in the more classical romanticism of Roxanne! There’s a general undergraduate Shakespeareishness to the whole enterprise, but the takeaway is unclear! Perhaps we're meant to realize that, within our own sphere of existence, each of us is our own Prospero! At any rate, the literary pretensions offer the opportunity for a cameo from Rick Moranis of Ghostbusters fame, who plays the gravedigger from Hamlet! (Remember that in Strange Brew, Moranis played a hoser version of either Rosencrantz or Guildenstern, so he comes by the experience honestly!) Further cameos come from Patrick Stewart, best known from Lifeforce; Chevy Chase of Fletch fame; and Woody Harrelson from Wildcats!

The movie comes from the director of Volcano, which is another L.A. movie! Ha ha, the two films might make a nice, highly specific little double feature - both of them, after all, are in their own way love letters to the City of Angels, and each of them contains an earthquake in the first reel, too! L.A. Story is a wisp of a puff of a thing, but it’s got plenty of amusing moments and good-natured performances, and if its satire doesn’t really leave any marks, that’s because its target is covered in Teflon! Ha ha! I give L.A. Story two and a half high colonics!

 

Burl reviews Purple Noon! (1960)

 

Allons-y sur le bateau, c’est Burl! Yes, it’s a French picture today, the first cinematic adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s debut Ripley novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley! The movie was retitled Plain Soleil, but is known to the English speaking world by the nonsensical but evocative title Purple Noon! So it’s a story virtually everyone is familiar with, from seeing The American Friend or The Talented Mr. Ripley; but for Purple Noon , the initial kick at the can, they really Frenched it up! And that’s no bad thing!

Tom Ripley, played by Alain Delon from Un Flic, is the poor hanger-on who has apparently been asked by the father of a rich playboy called Philippe Greenleaf, essayed by Maurice Ronet from Elevator to the Gallows, to bring his wayward Philippe to San Francisco! Whether this is actually the case is questionable: Ripley, we discover, is the sort of fellow who’ll say whatever is most convenient to him whether it’s true or not; and at one point Philippe claims to hardly know him!

By the time the characters are sailing around on a beautiful yacht, it’s pretty clear that Ripley’s default mode is covetousness, and that what he covets are Philippe’s lifestyle and his ladyfriend Marge, impressively played by first-time actor Marie Laforêt! Philippe treats her abominably; in one harrowing scene, outraged that she’s not giving all of her attention exclusively to him, Philippe tosses the manuscript she’s working on, about the fresco painter Fra Angelico, overboard and into the sea! Perhaps it’s at that moment that Ripley decides he must be killed; certainly it was when I decided it, ha ha!

But Tom doesn’t kill Philippe because he thinks there’s anything wrong with his behavior - indeed, he himself wants to behave just like Philippe! Billy Kearns from Playtime is another playboy, Freddy Miles, an American friend of Philippe’s who dislikes Ripley and becomes suspicious of him, and so must be disposed of by a violent bonking! And when this is done, Ripley, by clever manipulation of poor Marge, is ready to repattern his life as Philippe’s, and the only thing standing in his way is the filmmakers’ determination to end their movie differently than Highsmith ended her book! Ha ha!

For a movie that contains exactly zero characters one is disposed to like, and traded a perfectly sensible ending for one redolent of Production Code morals, this is an awfully nifty work of picturemaking! Ha ha, Delon’s performance nails the character exactly: a good-looking guy most people dislike on sight, who can play along with the fun times and is quick and clever enough to extemporize his way out of almost any situation, but who still exudes an air of dull desperation! The rest of the performances are excellent as well, and the Mediterranean location shooting from master lens-smith Henri Dëcae is fabulous, like a bright colour version of the same year’s L’ Avventura! René Clement, the director, pulls off the required tone without seeming to try anything specific at all, and that counts as an achievement in my book! It’s got a rich texture and a quiverful of subtleties, and beautiful people to look at and loathe! It’s a terrific picture and I give Purple Noon three dangling hands!

Burl reviews Enter the Dragon! (1973)

 

Kaa-chop, it’s Burl, with a little of the classic martial arts for you! Now, I’m not talking about Bruce Le, star of Infra-Man and Enter the Game of Death; nor Bruce Li, who toplined Exit the Dragon, Enter the Tiger and Blind Fist of Bruce; nor Bruce Lei from Enter the Deadly Dragon; nor Bruce K. L. Lea from Bruce Lee Fights Back From the Grave and Silent Assassins! No, today we have none other than the real-deal Bruce Lee in his final proper film appearance: that great favourite Enter the Dragon!

If you’re looking for a complex and unpredictable narrative, this is not the film for you! The story is simplicity itself: a martial arts expert is recruited by a toffee-nosed Hong Kong Brit to take part in a fight competition held on the private island of suspected drugs lord Han! He’s especially game for this because Han’s men were responsible for the death of Bruce’s beloved sister! Other participants in the competition are charismatic soul brother Jim Kelly, and, of all people, John Saxon, the iron-nosed cop from, your choice, Black Christmas, Blood Beach, or A Nightmare on Elm Street! He’s not a cop here, just a playa who does kung fu!

All the James Bond-y things you’d expect, like the skulking around and the fighting with henchmen, and the murder of the most likeable character, come to pass, and there are regular infusions of mano-a-mano, some of which are over unexpectedly quickly, others which are quite epic, and one of which doesn’t happen at all: on the boat trip to the island, where the old Purple Noon trick is pulled on an objectionable Kiwi! At one point we get to witness Bruce's impressive skill at twirling the nun-chuck-as, and that's a sight to behold! Ultimate vengeance comes in the hall of mirrors as Bruce battles the savage wolf claws of Han! Ha ha!

Of course director Robert Clouse tried this same story again a dozen years later in Gymkata, and the results were not stellar! In fact the results were downright Gymkata! But with Enter the Dragon, of course, he has such advantages as Bruce Lee, a good supporting cast, a decent budget, and again, Bruce Lee! And that means a world of difference, because Lee had style to burn and skills all day long, ha ha! What a genuinely terrible  shame that a cerebral edema got such a vital man at such a young age!

I guess there’s not a lot more to say about this iconic picture! The Lalo Schifrin score is not one of his more memorable, but it serves the purpose! Clouse’s direction is similarly nothing special, but he keeps it all moving and lets the fighters do their thing! It’s nice to see such familiar faces as Bolo Yeung, Sammo Hung and even, they say, Jackie Chan operating in the margins of this important movie! (Although Bolo is featured fairly heavily, and how could it be otherwise with a guy like Bolo!) Taking everything into perfect consideration, the proper thing to do is to give Enter the Dragon two and a half souvenir handbones!

Burl reviews Johnny Dangerously! (1984)

 

All bastiges be on the lookout! Ha ha, yes, it’s Burl here to review a mid-80s would-be crazycomedy that tries to play in the sandboxes already occupied by Top Secret on the one hand and, let’s say, City Heat on the other! Now those are two very distinct sandboxes, so it’s no real surprise that today’s picture, Johnny Dangerously, can’t really pull off whatever it’s trying to do!

The very first gag, with an ahh-oooga car crashing into the numbers “1935,” primes us for a Zucker-Abrams-Zucker free-for-all, which the movie only sporadically delivers on! It’s a flashback picture, with a pet store owner played by Michael Keaton from The Paper telling a local rapscallion the story of his entrée into the gangster lifestyle, which arises from a need to pay for the constant medical treatments required by his old Irish washerwoman ma, played by Maureen Stapleton from Interiors and The Money Pit!

We follow Johnny’s adventures as he bonds with his crime mentor, Jocko Dundee, essayed by Peter Boyle from Outland, romances a songbird called Lil, undertaken by Marilu Henner from L.A. Story, and clashes with his primary enemy, Danny Vermin, as personified by Joe Piscopo from Dead Heat! In the meantime Johnny’s little brother, played by Griffin Dunne from An American Werewolf in London, goes through law school and becomes a crime-fighting assistant D.A.! And among all this we get malapropisms galore from a rival crime boss, and this truly was the only element I could recall from seeing the picture on home videocassette with my friends back in 1985 or so! (Ha ha, I suspect we rented it from the 7-11 at the end of Dave's street!)

There are lots of cameo appearances from familiar people, like Danny DeVito from The Van and Ruthless People as a corrupt D.A., and Ray Walston from Silver Streak as an afflicted news vendor, along with Dick Butkus from Gremlins 2, Joe Flaherty from Club Paradise, Jack Nance from Ghoulies, and Alan Hale Jr. from The Giant Spider Invasion! The trouble is that the movie invites very few horselaughs, though there are smiles to be found here and there! The performers all try hard, but can only do so much when the movie around them is so bereft of pep, wit, or craft! (Brian De Palma apparently loved it however, and hired Piscopo and De Vito to be in his own gangster comedy Wise Guys on the strength of their performances here! Ha ha!)

It’s trying to parody the Warner Bros. gangster pictures of the 30s, but nobody involved seems to have watched very many of them beyond The Public Enemy, Angels With Dirty Faces, and the 1949 throwback White Heat! There’s no atmosphere in the photography, which looks more Channel 5 than chiaroscuro! And I’m afraid it simply isn’t uproarious enough! The picture has its moments, but too few of them by far; and I know some people are fond of it but me not so much; and so after all this is calculated I award Johnny Dangerously only one and a half fargin iceholes!

Burl reviews Creature with the Atom Brain! (1955)

 

By the atom brains it’s Burl, here to review a tale of nuclear zombie-men! Yes, we’re in the low-budget realm here, the territory of the little genre programmer, talking about an ephemeral movie that was never intended to be watched, spoken of or written about beyond its initial theatrical release, or possibly a television sale later on! Of course the picture I’m talking about is Creature with the Atom Brain, and how could it be any other? Ha ha!

We open with what turns out to be the most atmospheric shot in the entire movie: a bulky, pudding-faced man clumps up the street, looking and acting halfway between Boris Karloff and Tor Johnson! He’s an atomic zombie on a mission, putting a casino baron into a fatal bundabeya, then lumbering back to his car oblivious to the hail of lead being fired into his back by henchmen! Ha ha, turns out he's being radio-controlled by a formerly exiled gangster who, having hooked up with an ex-Nazi scientist and covertly returned to America, is stealing corpses, wiring up their brains, and sending them out to fold, spindle and mutilate the people responsible for his conviction and deportation!

Richard Denning from The Black Scorpion and The Oklahoma Woman, and of course The Creature from the Black Lagoon, plays the police laboratory man who’s puzzled by the strange clues left behind at the murder scenes: splashes of radioactive blood, glow-in-the-dark footprints, victims whose bones have been crushed! And there’s what seems like a separate mystery, but isn’t: the bodies of gangsters gone missing from the morgue! Denning's atomic zombie theories are made fun of by a local television anchor, but the newspaper writers seem to swallow them whole! Why, just look at those headlines!

 

 

The gangster behind it all is named Frank Buchanan, and he’s played by Michael Granger from Murder By Contract! Buchanan and his scientist pal have holed themselves up in a lead-lined mansion within which they and their equipment are undetectable by the boogie-cars roaming the city in search of telltale radioactivities! Meanwhile Denning and his partner/buddy Uncle Dave (as he’s known in the Denning household) try to convince the local newshounds that there really are atomic zombies, and do their darndest to find Granger’s hideout!

There’s lots of pipe smoking in this picture, but also some actual detective work, which, in concert with the goofy premise, gives the picture a unique tone that straddles police noirs like The Big Heat and genre goofs like producer Sam Katzman’s Zombies of Mora Tau! It gets some extra credit from me for using squibs to illustrate bullet hits when the zombies are shot - ha ha, I can’t think of any earlier movies that did that! And it gets more credit still for inspiring a fine Roky Erickson song!

It’s a little poky and repetitive, and the tiny budget hurts it occasionally, but I do tend to go easy on movies that take ridiculous ideas seriously! There’s some good ‘50s domestic stuff, but it bugged me whenever Denning, who blabs freely about the case to everyone else, shooed his wife from the room so he could talk about new developments with Uncle Dave! I think the way the wife is treated must have seemed old-fashioned and cruelly dismissive even at the time! Well, Curt Siodmack, who wrote the picture, was an old-ish guy by the mid 50s, I suppose, and not too hep! All things considered, and with due acknowledgement of its low-track enjoyability, I give Creature with the Atom Brain one and a half emanations!

Burl reviews The Running Man! (1987)

 

Ha ha, I told you I’d be back! And so I am, with another 80s Arnie extravaganza! I remember that I saw this in the theatre on my seventeenth birthday, and went from there around the corner to the local punk bar to see the marvelous band NoMeansNo play and sing their goodtime rock and roll music! I bought a copy of their wonderful album Wrong on that snowy November night, so to this day I feel a strange association between that watershed of heavy punk music and the movie under review, which is The Running Man!

Arnold, whom we know so well from Conan the Barbarian and Raw Deal, stars as a fellow sporting the traditional Austrian name Ben Richards! He’s a police helicopter pilot in a dystopian, game show-loving future who balks when asked to slaughter hundreds of people protesting a lack of available comestibles! Next thing you know he’s in prison, framed for the crime of slaughtering a hungry crowd, and he’s teamed up with Yaphet Kotto from Truck Turner and Marvin J. McIntyre from Fandango to escape the future jail, where if you cross a certain line at the wrong time, your head will explode like one of those watermelons David Letterman used to toss off a five story tower!

After hijacking Maria Conchita Alonso (whom we recall from Fear City and Extreme Prejudice) in more or less the same way he did Rae Dawn Chong in Commando, Arnie is netted by police and recruited by evil game show impresario Richard Dawson to guest star on his program The Running Man! In this telecast, hapless contestants run from a series of “stalkers,” played by the likes of Erland Van Lidth De Jeude from Alone in the Dark, Jim Brown from The Slams, Gus Rethwisch from The Concorde… Airport ’79 and Professor Toru Tanaka from Darkman! Ha ha, there are a lot of big men in this movie, and plus there’s ginormous Sven-Ole Thorson from Nowhere to Run, and Jesse “The Body” Ventura from Predator!

Mick Fleetwood and Dweezil Zappa, both of whom look thin as feathers compared to their bulky co-stars, play some underground resistance fellows with whom Arnie hooks up after he’s battled all the novelty warriors! Ha ha, these battle scenes are fairly perfunctory, and Arnie seems to pause and deliver at least two catch phrases for each victory! “Here is Subzero, now plain zero!” is at once the most famous and the least sensical of them! The climax, too, is pretty shoddy, with a little bit of running around and some machine guns going off, yawn; but at least there's a satisfying disposal of the villain!

The picture was directed by Starsky himself, Paul Michael Glaser, whom we know from his starring appearance in Phobia, and he tries to apply some of that Miami Vice gloss to the movie, but it never really sticks! He’s not the most accomplished action director either, and the fighting and chasing and car crashes are never as exciting as they ought to be! Only the tube cars which convey the contestants down to the boring wasteland in which they compete manage to stick in the memory!

It’s not all bad! Arnie is on autopilot most of the time, but manages a few good lines! Richard Dawson is very convincing as the nasty gamesman, so much so that I now look at old episodes of Family Feud slightly askance, ha ha! The cast altogether is a little weird, that’s for sure, which is all to the good; but imagine what it could have been like with real imagination behind the camera, giving us stuff more along the line of the Thunderdome scenes in the third Mad Max picture! Kinetic and bizarre and thrilling, more punk rock and less dancing: those would all have been good choices to make for this film, but few of these values are found! It’s a film of some vaguely approached but in the end entirely squandered potential, and I give The Running Man one and a half neck bombs!

Burl reviews Iced! (1989)

 

Schuss schuss, it’s Burl, here on the slopes to review a tale of downhill slashing! Of course there are earlier examples of ski lodge horror, most notably Snowbeast, but this picture, Iced, is probably the first time a slasher got to work on the hard pack!

Like many slashers, this one starts with the Traumatic Inciting Incident From Several Years Before! We find ourselves in the midst of a group of ski-happy puffhairs having lifestyle fun at the winter resort! But there’s a conflict, and the tightly-wound Jeff, who suffers first a romantic setback and then a humiliation on the slopes, complains to an unseen person that his so-called pals appear to be questioning his integrity as a skier! Jeff then goes for a nighttime rip and ends up plummeting chest-first onto a rock!

Five years later the surviving friends all get mysterious invitations to a free vacation at Snow Peak, a new and unimaginatively-named mountaintop resort! But the weekend goes decidedly off-piste when a mysterious figure in a powder-blue snowsuit and cracked goggles gets out the old carving ski and goes to work! Although "goes to work" is not quite accurate, ha ha! The killer flattens one of the pals with a snowplow before the unlucky victim has a chance to even arrive at the resort, much less unpack, but after that the maniac waits a very long time to resume his killing spree!

This time is filled with the kind of late-80s horror-soap drama familiar to anyone who’s seen Bloodmoon! The histrionics are enacted by actors of varying levels of talent, several of whom should have known what was coming, as they've had trouble with slashers before! Trina, played by Debra De Liso from The Slumber Party Massacre, is the main lady here, and her husband Cory is Doug Stevenson from The Prowler! Wednesday Addams herself, Lisa Loring from Blood Frenzy, is the resident hot tamale, and Joseph Alan Johnson from Berserker and Hollywood Hot Tubs, who also wrote the script for this confunction, is the guy trying-but-not-trying to sell time shares of the ski resort cabin! And there’s an ill-fated couple played by John C. Cooke from The Puppet Masters and Elizabeth Gorcey from Footloose, Grandview U.S.A. and Teen Wolf!

On paper, the picture delivers the goods one expects from a slasher, with several scenes of both real and imagined bohankie, and a few Special Makeup Effects sprinkled here and there! Ha ha, the ski pole through the neck and the icicle in the eye are highlights (and in this latter effect, the movie beats Renny Harlin to the punch, as his use of icicles as murder weapons in Die Hard 2 and Cliffhanger came only later!), and the luring of the rattail-sporting drugs fiend into a garden of bear traps has a certain grisly impact! But for all this it’s not terribly memorable - there’s precious little pep in the filmmaking, and the characters are by and large intolerable!

For a ski resort picture there’s not much skiing, which is fine, and the lodge itself is strangely anodyne! This atmosphere extends to nearly the whole picture, with a few small exceptions! The climax has the main lady running around in a ski jacket, however no pants; and the post-climax codicil is a delightful burst of absurdity involving a snowman! Ha ha! Most of the picture is pretty tiresome though, with a full load of melodrama to endure and not much vim to leaven it! The mystery aspect is underdone as well! It’s all very late-80s, and that will be a draw for some I suppose; and with that in mind I give Iced one Rockadiles shirt!

Burl reviews And No Birds Sing! (1969)

 

Ha ha and hello, it’s Burl here! Today I’ve got a real obscurity for you: a short feature, or maybe a long short, ha ha, made by a university student’s union in the late 60s, shot in glorious black and white, minimalist in plot and only just over forty minutes long, but with plenty of groovy music, entitled And No Birds Sing!

It’s set in and around a university campus in the 60s, so that’s a pretty marvelous starting point! Our main character is a soporific nonentity called Joey, played as though mostly asleep by one-and-done actor Ian Malcolm! (Ha ha, no, he’s not the leather jacket professor played by Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park!) Joey, bereft of intellectual ambition, of vigor, or of character traits of any kind, is fixated on a fellow student named Virginia, played by Marsha Sadoway! He’s already got a girlfriend though, a perfectly sweet young lady, and though in his brief bit of narration at the beginning of the movie Joey allows that this puts him “in kind of a bind,” he seems to entirely lack any means to deal with it!

Joey’s pal is Alvin, a straight-talking glasses nerd played by Michael Posner in the picture’s best performance! We see these fellows in their classes (one of them an English class taught by Victor Cowie who was in Careful, and who also wrote and directed this picture, in which he discusses the Keats ballad “La Belle Dame sans Merci, containing the line “And no birds sing”) and discover that Joey seems to have no interest in anything but the girl with which he is obsessed, while Alvin is more engaged in the subject at hand!

Joey is just as dissociated from his tolerant-to-a-fault girlfriend, and it only takes a scene or two of the couple conversing to convince you that she should really find someone a little more fun to be with! Ha ha, the guy’s a real drip, and besides, hey lady, Alvin's right there! Anyway, after some scenes on the campus, a bit of outasight nightclub stuff, and shots of Virginia running through the forest looking alternately coy and fearful (which I take to be Joey’s daydreams of his crush acting the dryad), we finally get to the big party scene, held in a house that looked somewhat familiar to me! The people certainly looked familiar - ha ha, I’ve seen photos of my parents attending just such parties!

This is a good, Canadian, Trudeau-the-Elder-era party, with plenty of stubby beer bottles and boxes of Old Dutch chips, and hippies lurking in the corners! Here, Joey manages to ditch his girlfriend, corner Virginia, and profess his devotion; but he gets a bit creepy, and worse than that boring, and ends up passed out on the coat bed! Ha ha! So much for his romantic quest!

The picture has exactly the feel of a movie made by a students’ union, ha ha! I didn’t much care for Joey, who I suppose was meant to be a Ben Braddock of the North, but I did like a couple of his friends and the places he went! Miscommunication seems to be the movie’s abiding theme, as characters frequently misinterpret, don’t understand, or simply don’t seem to hear what the others are saying to them, and again, Joey is the standard bearer for this! In the end it’s a classic example of a movie that follows closely a character who never comes close to earning such devotional scrutiny! I give And No Birds Sing two peace buttons!