Burl reviews Halloween! (1978)

Ha ha, it’s Burl here to review a seasonal classic! It’s hard to imagine the landscape of cinema without this movie in it – it’s so basic and primal, it feels like this was the movie that had to be made before any more complex horror pictures could be attempted! Of course that’s not how it works, and glad I am of that, but still and all I do mean that as a complement to this fantastic low-budget horror phenomenon!

I don’t need to tell you the plot, do I? Ha ha, babysitters are stalked by a masked madman! Yes, that’s it! Mr. Michael Myers puts on his unpainted William Shatner mask, gets himself a kitchen knife and starts poking away! He puts a poking on his very own sister in the movie’s opening moments, and you’ve got to feel sorry for her because after all, her boyfriend just gave her the quickest rogering known to man, or should I say to woman, ha ha!

I’ll tell you, when it comes to movies like this – and there were an awful lot of them in the years following this one, let me assure you! – I always enjoy the part before the killings, where the characters are just hanging out and doing their thing! And these babysitters are a pretty likeable bunch, real classic 70s gals! It’s great that a couple of obviously popular girls hang out with a donkey girlscout like Jamie Lee Curtis! Ha ha, and John Carpenter sure was lucky to find her too, because who else could have pulled off saying “Well kiddo, I thought you outgrew superstition” to herself! Very few!

I like to think that if I was in high school with Laurie Strode, I would have taken her out on a date, not like that Ben Tramer! He obviously didn’t know a good thing when he saw it, and anyway, didn’t he get totaled in Halloween II? I think he did, ha ha! So I could have been the one if only I’d been there! And another thing, isn’t Annie a peach? She was great, even if she was the kind of girl who would babysit for the sort of people who do their laundry in a shed! And then the way she got stuck in the window was maybe not so believable, but it was pretty cute! She’s such a laid back gal, and she does funny jokes as well, like when she says “I have a place for that,” or, about her cynical cop of a father, “He shouts, too!”

Of course what everyone remembers from the movie is the scenes of Michael attacking Laurie in the house, and those are pretty darn good! I’ve seen this movie so many times I can’t even remember what my reaction was the first time I saw it, but I like to think I was right in there appreciating the suspense! The scenes where Michael’s white mask just melts out of the darkness are creepy no matter how many times you see them, though!

A lot of people give this movie some guff because it’s not very gory! Well, the sequel made up for that a little bit, and anyway, I never missed the gore, not really! Sure, a little bit of tomato paste and some Special Makeup Effects might have been nice, but when you get the great performances, the nice photography and the fine direction, what more do you want, really! Mr. Donald Pleasance, who once essayed the role of Blofeld in You Only Live Twice, was excellent as the grump of a doctor who wanted to keep Michael locked away forever and always!

Anyway, these are a pretty scattershot bunch of observations, because after all everyone else has reviewed this movie too, but it’s always fun to watch and to think about, which I do just about every Halloween! I don’t even mind that it was shot in Los Angeles in the summer instead of Illinois in the fall, because they do get some dried leaves and denuded trees in there, and there’s only occasionally a palm tree or bit of California architecture lurking in the deep background! I award this marvelous horror picture four post-coital beers served up by glasses guys in sheets! Ha ha!

Burl reviews The Haunting! (1963)

Ha ha, hi, it’s Burl here, reviewing another movie for my blog, and whoever reviews here, reviews alone! Ha ha, even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to review! But for now, let’s have a look at the original film version of The Haunting!

Of course it was based on Ms. Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House, which is a corker! Naturally it made for a spooky movie, and thank goodness the making of it was taken up by someone with at least a passing acquaintance with the films of Val Lewton, which is to say the director Robert Wise! Of course, Wise had more than a passing acquaintance with Lewton’s works, having directed one and a half of them, but I’d still like to see the film Jacques Tourneur would have made of it! That’s a bit churlish of me to say, since Wise did a fine job, but it’s still fun to speculate!

The Haunting is a classic haunted house movie, perhaps the template for the particular strain of them that I especially love! I really appreciate those movies where an investigative team is assembled which includes a heady admixture of psychics, skeptics and scientists, and where there’s a scene in which everybody sips port in the parlor as they listen to the unsavory history of the house they’re investigating! And after that, it’s on! Boogety-boogety of all sorts is unleashed!

There are other movies in this vein, including The Legend of Hell House and The Evil, and of course a reportedly misbegotten remake of The Haunting which I’ve never seen; but of them all this might be the one to beat! The main character, Eleanor, is perhaps too pathetic by about half, but Julie Harris makes it work! The rest of the acting is strong also, even that of noted oddball Russ "Blood Screams" Tamblyn! And the design of the house is about as spooky as it gets!

Eleanor becomes convinced that the house wants her to stay, and that she’d be happiest if she did indeed stay, as she has nowhere else in particular to go; and of course a variation on that is exactly what happens in the end! The head scientist and instigator of the whole experiment is played by Richard Johnson, and it’s hard to see what his actual investigative plan was intended to be, besides inviting some particularly sensitive people to the house and seeing what happens! It would be nice to read his post-experiment paper on the subject, ha ha!

I’ve heard the remake is simply dreadful, but I’ll tell you one thing I think might have been improved, and that’s the sound design! It’s purely a technical thing: all the times in the older movie when the unearthly thumping comes up and down the hallway, the characters have to tell us where it’s supposed to be! Aiieee, it’s at the top of the door! Ahhh, land o’ Goshen, it’s on the other side of the hallway! Things like that! Whereas modern cinematic sound mixing techniques would allow us to hear it for ourselves, and let the characters be frightened in a more realistically nonverbal fashion!

Of course I haven’t seen the new one, so I don’t know if they took advantage of that! And even if they did, I’ll bet the old one is still far and away the better version! I give the original Robert Wise production of The Haunting three and a half desperately creepy housekeepers!

Burl reviews Island of Lost Souls! (1932)

Ha ha, am I not Burl? I am, and I’m here to review the first screen version of H.G. Welles The Island of Dr. Moreau, which was titled Island of Lost Souls for some reason! I’ve seen this one a few times, but it just gets better and better, and just the other day I saw the new DVD version that was recently released, and that was the best of all!

The story is pretty well known, I would think! A castaway ends up on Dr. Moreau’s mysterious South Seas island, where it transpires that he’s been using weird science to transform animals into human simulacra! Some of his beastpeople, like Lota the Panther Woman, are more successful than others, and some of them have Hungarian accents for some reason! Ha ha, that would be the Sayer of the Law, played by Bela Lugosi sporting the greatest beard ever filmed!

Moreau is played by Charles Laughton, who wears the second-greatest whiskers of all time! They’re shaped like an anchor, and perfectly suit Laughton’s great, haughty moon face! The whip-cracking Laughton is simply perfect in his part as the oily and sadistic but undeniably genius sawer of bones! He can be a real hambone, though I really enjoy his performances in that mode; but here, at least until the last few minutes of the picture, he plays everything pretty well down, to great and chilling effect!

Ha ha, they really play up his sadism in this version! The doctor seems not to have even heard of anesthetic, and so his surgeries are conducted without its benefit; but of course it would probably be a lot easier and more pleasant for him if his subjects weren’t squirming around and bellowing in pain! I guess he’s dedicated not just to the speeding-up of the evolutionary process, which is his stated goal as a scientist, but also to the delivery of pain! No wonder he’s nicknamed his operating theatre The House of Pain!

This is a top-notch picture, and I’d put it up there with other creepy pre-Code horror classics like Freaks and The Black Cat, two pictures I’m just wild about! The climax, with the beastpeople on a vengeful rampage, recalls that of Freaks quite a bit, though it lacks that extra frisson you get from watching actual deformed people slithering through the mud with castra*ion knives clutched between their teeth! But it’s safe to say that Moreau comes to an appropriately sticky end!

The movie looks great, the acting is flavorful across the board and the makeup on the animal fellows is absolutely as good as it gets! Why, this is an excellent picture! I give Island of Lost Souls four drunken seacaptains and urge you to see this remarkable and horrific movie!

Burl reviews A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge! (1985)

Hi, it’s Burl talking to you once again, and happy to be doing it! I’m here to take a look at another installment in a famous horror movie series, which is to say the Freddy Krueger pictures! This is the second of them, and most people you ask will tell you it’s the worst of the bunch!

Well, I’m not sure about that, but it’s probably the weirdest, and that in itself has value! Ha ha, they also say it’s the most homosexual of them all, and I guess that’s probably correct! Some people seem to think this is a bad thing, but I think there are surely enough gay horror movie lovers out there that it’s only right and proper that this constituency be recognized much better than they have been! Ha ha, probably all the horror franchises should have at least one overtly queer episode just to be fair about things! The Leprechaun one would be a particular gem, I’m sure!

The main character in A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2 is Jesse, who has the double misfortune of having moved into Nancy’s house from the first picture, and having an unsympathetic dad played by the great Clu Gulager! We’re introduced to Jesse in a schoolbus sequence at the beginning of the movie, which we can immediately tell is a nightmare because in his own subconscious mind, Jesse is apparently a cringing geek!

When Jesse wakes up from this dream, and whenever he wakes up from any dream, and just at random moments throughout the movie, he lets out a piercing, girlish scream that seems dubbed in from one of Fay Wray’s more hysterical scenes! It seems that Freddy is trying to possess Jesse into committing his murders for him; left unexplained is why Freddy (who is referred to in this movie simply as Fred) wants to do the murders at all! In the first picture he had some fairly specific revenge in mind; in this one his mayhem is pretty random, despite the movie’s subtitle!

Everything in this movie is just slightly off, which you might think is because the filmmakers were so clever as to give their entire production an unreal, dreamlike atmosphere, but is actually because the script is simply nonsense! Freddy makes a parakeet explode in flames! Why? He attacks a pool party, revealing himself in an apparently corporeal form to dozens of people! How come? He is apparently able to be defeated by the love of a young Meryl Streep lookalike! Qhé?!?!

I also wonder how Robert Downey Jr.’s pal from Weird Science, once again playing a bullying sportsjock, becomes Jesse’s good friend all of a sudden! I guess it’s because they’re both subjected to the homoerotic attentions of Mr. Kuato, their coach! (And speaking of Mr. Kuato, there’s one shot in this movie where Freddy looks for all the world like that psychic homunculus of sci-fi fame!)

I realize logic is not what you look for in a movie like this, but consistency, along with excitement and scariness, would be nice! But ha ha, we get none of that! However, we do get the aforementioned Meryl Streep lookalike, who was pretty good in her role and reminded me not only of a young Meryl Streep, but of the female lead from The Outing! Ha ha, it would have been nice to get to know both those gals back in the day!

Anyway, some of the weirdness in this picture is enjoyable, like the exploding parakeet and the fact that Clu Gulager thinks it exploded because it was fed cheap birdseed! I give this sophomore stumble in the Freddy Krueger saga one and a half piercing shrieks!   

Burl reviews Moontide! (1942)

Hi, Burl here to do a review of a classic dramamovie which I’d never heard of before watching it! It’s Moontide, and it was Jean Gabin’s first foray into Hollywood after so much success in France! But he left France because of, you know, Nazis, and this was the story that caught his eye!

It was directed by a guy named Archie Mayo, but it turns out that it was supposed to be directed by Fritz Lang, and in fact old Fritz was at the helm for a couple of weeks before deciding that the combined forces of Gabin and Darryl Zanuck, which were arrayed against him, were too much! He folded his jodhpurs, packed away his pince-nez and off he traipsed! Ha ha, if I’d known Lang had even a small part in the making of this picture, I’d have checked it out long ago!

Well, it’s very Lang, I must say, and it also reminds me quite a bit of one of Josef Von Sternberg’s waterfront melodramas, particularly Docks of New York! Ha ha, I really love those pictures, so when I heard that Moontide took place in a seedy Southern California harbor town, I was sold!

Gabin plays Bobo, the violence-prone dockworker who lives the gypsy lifestyle, weighted down only by his sinister connection to the almost-as-hefty Tiny, an annoying hanger-on played by famed character actor Thomas Mitchell! Bobo likes to drink, and he likes to drink a lot, and a particularly heroic night of consumption leads to what I feel safe in calling the finest Surrealist-inspired drunken montage in film history! Ha ha, they got Salvador Dali himself in to design it, and even though his ideas proved either too disturbing or simply unworkable, a lot of the old brushman’s spirit made it into the sequence!

Turns out an old guy got a pretty stiff neck-twist sometime during Bobo’s binge, large swaths of which he can’t remember too clearly! Did Bobo do the murder? With his mangle-strength hands and hair-trigger temper, he’s certainly capable of it! But the question is less than burning for most of the picture, since Bobo gets a job and a home on a bait barge and coincidentally meets up with a hangdog hash-slinger played by Ida Lupino; and all this makes him think maybe it’s time to settle down!

So Bobo and Ida slowly fall in love and make the bait barge a home, and meanwhile gather a group of fellow waterfronters around them, like the guys who own the barge, a sawbones yachtsman, a bartender and a philosophical night watchman played by Claude Raines! But Tiny is always there in the background threatening to cause trouble, and finally, once Bobo and Ida get married, causing quite a little bit of it!

Seedy waterfront movies, motley-family pictures and proto-noirs are all favorite micro-genres of mine, and this movie is all of those things! Naturally, I enjoyed it quite a bit! It’s also one of those movies where the source material has been so obviously watered down for the morals of the day that the bowdlerization is entertaining in itself! Clearly Ida is meant to be an ex-prostitute, but she gets referred to as a waitress as though “waitress” is simply another word for hooker! There’s a fade to black that screams “rape!” more disturbingly than an actual depiction of the act might have done! And so on!

I give Moontide three fancy-pants drinks and recommend you give it a shot!

Burl reviews Garden of the Dead! (1972)

Hi, it’s Burl shambling towards you with his arms outstretched! Ha ha, I’ve often wondered to myself why there weren’t more zombie movies after 1968, when Night of the Living Dead became the most profitable independent picture ever made at that time! You’d think anyone with a camera, a few feet of film and some buddies willing to slap on blue makeup and stumble around in the night would be cranking out some kind of …of the Dead movie! Ha ha, I sure would have been!

Well, not everybody was asleep at the switch! In 1972, a macabre tale of formaldehyde-huffing prisoners who get killed in an escape attempt and then seek revenge as zombies came along, and it was called Garden of the Dead! I guess their garden was the graveyard in which they’d been shallowly buried, or else maybe the title refers to the fact that they carry rakes and hoes with which to commit their mayhem! Anyway, there’s no actual garden, but that’s okay!

The action takes place at a formaldehyde farm staffed by prisoners and run by a fairly mean warden! The guards aren’t that bad though – they allow Johnson, the nice-guy prisoner, to step outside the incredibly flimsy fence to hug his best gal, Mrs. Johnson, who comes to visit him every day but usually has to talk to her beau from thirty feet away! But after the big escape, in which Johnson gets knifed by the way, the warden and the guards ruthlessly hunt the formaldehyde-addicted felons down and blast them into cranberry jelly and drumsticks as they plead for their lives!

Because of all that formaldehyde they’ve huffed I guess, the boys don’t stay down for long! I didn’t know about formaldehyde’s reanimating properties, and you’d think there would be a lot more reports of hoodoo if that were the case, with schoolchildren being chased out of their biology classes by zombie frogs and the like! So the dead prisoners gather up some gardening tools, bellow their war cry “We must destroy the living!” and they’re on their way!

It’s a siege situation for the rest of the picture, with the camp under attack! Warden, guards, the remaining prisoners, anyone is fair game for these old boys! Except for Mrs. Johnson, whom the zombies would like to make their formaldehyde bride! It turns out that the zombies have only two weaknesses: bright light, which reduces them to Play-Doh form, and close-range shotgun blasts! But still, they’re pretty quick with those rakes and pick axes!

You know, this isn’t a very well-liked little movie by most, I'm sad to report! It’s barely an hour long, and there’s not a lot of time spent on character development and stuff like that – most of the screen time is devoted to the shots of the prisoners, pre- and post-mortem, huffing and drinking and wallowing in their beloved formaldehyde! Boy, they must stink pretty bad! I didn’t even know that formaldehyde could get you high!

But there are a few effective scenes, and lots of the old-fashioned foggy graveyard stuff that always plays well with a guy like ol’ Burl! I wish they’d put a bit more energy into the siege and tried to bring it up to Night of the Living Dead intensity levels, but no such luck! There’s one pretty neat scene where the survivors are creeping along towards a safe place, trying to stay within the beam of a prison searchlight as the growling zombies reach in from the darkness around them! And the generator keeps failing, ha ha! So this is a minor league Halloween treat, and I’ll give it two blue-skinned mustachioed goofs!

Burl reviews Halloween III: Season of the Witch! (1982)

Hi, Burl here to review the most loathed of all the Halloween movies, which is to say number three, the one with no Michael Myers! But it’s not loathed by me, and I find it a lot more entertaining than some of the other later entries! For example, there was one involving some sort of reality show that I found nearly unwatchable! Ha ha, I can’t even remember the title of that one!

But Halloween III discombobulated everyone by having nothing to do with Halloweens I and II, and considering that Michael Myers, the masked knife-maniac from the earlier pictures, had been blown to flinders in a hospital conflagration, it seems an understandable move on the part of the filmmakers! They thought it made more sense to brand the title and, in essence, the holiday along with it, at least as it pertained to horror movies; and then the idea would be to make a different Halloween-themed movie every year!

I actually think that’s a pretty good idea, but Joe Moviewatcher evidently did not! I went to see Halloween III when it came out (very excitedly, though I was on the young side for such a film), but I must have been among the few! Anyway, you’d think with the combined star power of Tom Atkins (from The Fog) and Dan O’Herlihy (from Fail-Safe) there’d be an enthusiastic audience for such a photoplay, but it was just not the case! Perhaps when word got around of the incredibly annoying commercial jingle heard repeatedly throughout the film, the constituency that normally would have flocked to it got scared off! Ha ha, ya bunch of wimps!

The story is simplicity itself! A man comes running down the street holding on to a pumpkin mask, and then later in the hospital a strange businessman pops out the man’s eyes and then pulls his face up! This leads to an investigation on the part of a local doctor's moustache and the dead man’s curly-haired daughter, and together they discover the nefarious toy company, staffed largely by robots as it turns out, which is the headquarters of a warlock named Colonel Cochrane! I don’t know in which army Cochrane achieved the rank of Colonel, but their recruiting standards are very lax!

Anyway, the Colonel has a plan: blast the skulls of America’s children into fishsticks by selling them rubber masks equipped with laser beams, which will be set off Halloween night by some unholy combination of the aforementioned jingle and the rocks of Stonehenge! His witchery, his weird science and his robot army are pitted against Tom Atkins’ moustache, and we all know that in such a contest there can be only one victor!

Ha ha, this movie is the goofiest thing ever, but I feel a great deal of affection for it! I love the grotesque makeup effects, like the lady who gets accidentally blasted in the face! I love that snakes and bugs are somehow generated when the lasers go off! Ha ha, poor Little Buddy! I like Tom Atkins’ heroics! And it’s great that the Colonel’s plan is so odd and insane and pointlessly sadistic and, as far as we can tell from the sudden cut to black at the end, successful!

It could have been a better movie, I’ll grant you that! If John Carpenter had directed it in full Prince of Darkness mode and made it a little more dynamic, suspenseful and scary, we might have a full-on Halloween classic on our hands! Instead we have more of a curio, a thing some will take to their hearts and most will hate or just dismiss, like those hard, sticky orange-wrapped candies that used to fill the bottom of your bag at the end of a long night of trick or treating! Hey, I liked those candies! I give Halloween III two and a half pulled-off bum heads and all the arterial spray that goes with it!

Burl reviews Ring of Terror! (1962)

Hel-lo, it’s Burl! Let me take you on a stroll down Graveyard Lane! Ha ha, no, I haven’t turned into a horror host; I’m just quoting Reegor, the cadaverous, string-tie-wearing cemetery caretaker we meet in the opening moments of Ring of Terror, as he searched for his housecat Puma! Reegor prowls the tombstones calling for Puma for about the first half of the seventy-two minute picture, or so it seems, anyway! Puma! Puma! Puma? Don’t be afraid, Puma! Come to Reegor! Pu-ma!

Ha ha! Eventually Reegor finds Puma sitting pretty near the grave of Lewis Moffitt! “Ah ha ha!” Reegor says! “I remember him!” And then the screen goes all wavy, and we’re treated to the story of how Lewis Moffitt met his presumably sticky end! It does for all the world seem like the beginning of an anthology picture with a particularly weak wraparound, as though after Lewis Moffitt’s tale, Reegor’s housecat will go missing again and turn up washing himself on the grave of some other poor sucker with a story; and then it would happen once or twice more before some pithy wrap-up from Reegor! But no, Lewis Moffitt is the only guy we’re going to hear about this go round! Maybe they just ran out of money, or maybe this is an omnibus picture after all, but they decided to make it a single-story omnibus! Ha ha, a bungalow picture, we could call it! Or maybe they assumed Reegor would be such a wildly popular character that this would be the start of a series of anecdotal horror pictures in which he is the recurring character! Or maybe the housecat died before they could shoot any more of his segments, who knows!

So what is this amazing Lewis Moffitt story anyway? Well, it’s hard to imagine Reegor going into as much detail about it in his telling as the movie does in its dramatization; but, in short, it seems that Lewis Moffitt is a dedicated medical student whose apparent lack of fear is disturbing and off-putting to everyone from his girlfriend to his fellow freshmen, to the seniors who are planning the big pledge party and its attendant tradition of uproarious prank assignments! Nobody can understand why Lewis Moffitt isn’t afraid of snakes or dead bodies or peer disapproval! And meanwhile, a goofy chubby couple are trotted out at regular intervals to be made fun of through various unimaginative fat jokes: like, for example, wow, do they ever like eating hot dogs!

Eventually, by way of fraternity shenanigans, Lewis Moffitt’s fear-related Achilles heel is discovered! And the experience which the brothers set up for him is so dreadfully scary that it kills him stone dead! Ha ha! We know from the beginning that he dies, so don’t worry, I’m not ruining anything for you!

The story does become much more interesting, I must say, if you imagine Reegor droning on about the specifics of it, telling the hefty-people jokes and the mundane details of dormitory life or Lewis Moffitt’s relationship with his plain-Jane girlfriend and all the other irrelevant things that happen! It's fun to wonder how, for example, he describes the adventures of the glasses nerd who gets dressed up as Cupid but has nothing to do with the main thread of the story? Ha ha, we can’t know for sure, but if we are to believe this is all a story Reegor is telling us, then I guess he must be relating it some way or another!

Anyway, this is a simple story padded out to an unbelievable degree, but it has all sorts of marvelous aspects, such as the energetic depiction of mid-50s campus life! It makes you feel you were in school at that time yourself, hanging out with your best gal at the cafeteria and listening to the groovy tunes of the Campus Cool Cats, the least-engaged party band ever to grace the silver screen!

It’s a drab, cheap little stinker of a movie, but still surprisingly watchable! I believe it was made fun of on the robot show, so some may prefer to check out that version! Here’s an interesting fact about it: the guy who plays Lewis Moffitt, George Mather, was also the cinematographer of Holy Wednesday! Ha ha, how’s that for an odd connection? I give Ring of Terror one and a half elusive bicolor housecats!   

Burl reviews Last Rites! (1988)

Finally it’s Burl! Ha ha, I’m here to review a movie that has a pretty sour reputation, and that’s the thriller picture Last Rites! When I think of this movie, which is never, I think about it as one of those bland big-budget bombs that helped send MGM into a deep pit of debt in the late 80s! Spellbinder is another one of those, and Masquerade, and Taffin and Memories of Me! Not exactly a gallery of winners there, ha ha!

 

I’ve never been all that interested in priest dramas, I have to confess – I’m not what you’d call a churchgoing fellow, so that might have something to do with it! Or the fact that crises of faith and wrestling with vows of chastity are not things I can connect with directly or in any meaningful way! But no matter – there are plenty of good priest movies! That Alfred Hitchcock one, I Confess, was pretty good, even if it wasn’t one of his very best! And of course there’s The Night of the Iguana, which is sort of a priest movie, even though I used to think it was about a giant iguana!

 

I guess I’d better get around to reviewing Last Rites! Well, it seems Tom Berenger from Someone To Watch Over Me plays Father Michael, who runs a giant New York church with only the dad from Sixteen Candles to help him! (That is to say, Paul Dooley from Strange Brew!) There’s a popgun murder of a guy who’s just been making sweet love, and the murderess turns out to be Father Michael’s sister, and she’s a mob queen, second only in the Family to their father, Don Something-Or-Other! Meanwhile, the lady who was also engaged in the sweet lovemaking, a Mexican exotic dancer, escapes and goes to seek sanctuary with, of all the padres in all the world, Father Michael! What happens then? You guessed it: priestgasm!

 

This is a fairly slick production, I suppose, directed with TV blandness by a TV director, but at least photographed attractively by David Watkin, the crazy man who shot one of the most audaciously good-looking movies ever made, Catch-22! But the script! My gosh, it’s like it was written on a series of napkins over a long liquid lunch, and then half the napkins were lost on the drunken stumble home! Ha ha, what was the relationship between the cop and the murdered man? Why so many intimations of incest between Father Michael and his batty sis? (She, incidentally, is played by the mom from Deadly Friend!) Why does everybody end up in Mexico, and who are some of these random guys who show up every now and again? They can’t all be from Sicily! And what about that crazy arbitrary twist? Up is down, down is up! Ha ha!

 

Anyway, it’s a bit of a mess, as you can probably tell! The exotic Mexican dancer is played by Daphne Zuniga from The Initiation, and she has, as near as I can tell, the worst Spanish accent since Charlton Heston in Touch of Evil, and I don’t think he was even trying to do one in that movie! Also I’m pretty sure the last shot was supposed to give you flashbacks to the last scene in The Godfather, but you probably don’t even have to ask if it succeeds! Ha ha! Altogether this picture is a real daffodil, and I can’t say I recommend it unless you like goofy, slightly seamy big-budget misfires! I award this dreadful movie one half of a perplexing denouement!

Burl reviews Dead Space! (1991)

Well, you know what – it’s Burl! This time I’m reviewing a movie called Dead Space, which, if you can believe it, is a remake of another movie I’ve already reviewed, Forbidden World, made only nine years previously! I can just hear the question uppermost in your minds: “Ha ha, Burl, how could they possibly improve on Forbidden World?”

Well, turns out they can’t! You probably remember the plot: a space troubleshooter gets a distress call from a distant space lab, and drops in to offer whatever space help he can! It turns out the scientists have created a life form which is intended to cure some kind of space disease, but it pops out of its incubator, kills a crew member and proceeds to stalk the base, getting larger and larger and munching on people whenever it can!

You can see this is just the same plot as Forbidden World, and of course as Alien too, but that’s beside the point when we’re talking Roger Corman pictures, which we certainly are! What made Forbidden World so memorable was that it very energetically brought what we in the movie appreciation business call The Goods! The goods for a movie like this are approximately as follows: great monsters, plenty of blood and gore, lots of naked ladies, a few witty lines and some exciting action! Good old FW has most of these ingredients, while Dead Space has practically none!

Sure, it has a monster, which starts out looking like a little sponge and ends up like something you might see hanging off the wall in a two-bit carnival funhouse! It’s pretty inert throughout, and lacks even the minimal personality found in the earlier Corman monsters, such as the randy maggot from Galaxy of Terror! This monster just seems kind of sad, even though he was made by Gabe Bartalos, famous for creating the dancing leprechaun in those Leprechaun movies, and everyone loves that guy! Also, I did like it when the monster busted in through walls like the Kool-Ade Man! And there’s a naked lady in this picture too, but it’s a dream sequence where the space troubleshooter, played by the Beastmaster himself, has a dream about making sweet love! And then there’s one pretty good scene near the end where a fellow’s head is pulled right off!

I do have to mention the Beastmaster’s robot companion, Tinpan, who has a hydraulic chin! Tinpan manages to have a bit of a C3-PO-ish prickliness about him, and he’s got that great chin, but below the neck he just looks like a guy in regular human clothes – not the most convincing droid I’ve ever seen! But he's good compared to most of the rest of the cast, with an exception being Bryan Cranston, who plays the head of the lab! No, I don't think it's a meth lab, but you know, now I'm not quite so sure! Ha ha, maybe it was! Anyway, he's okay in the movie! I kind of preferred his correlative in Forbidden World, who was played by the mad scientist from Repo Man! Ha ha, that's the guy who should have his own TV program about mind drugs!

But mostly it’s a dull and boring cruickshank about people wandering up and down space hallways, occasionally shooting their guns at a rubber crab! I have to say that the title is well earned! Tinpan’s okay, but I in the end I give this rather misbegotten picture one single blue Spandex workout suit!