Burl reviews Murder by Contract! (1958)

Hi, Burl here to review a lone wolf hired killer movie, which is a genre I certainly like, but don’t have the great love for that some other people do! This is an older one though, and so it has some very special attributes, which I would like to tell you about now!

This is the story of Claude, played by Vince Edwards from Cellar Dweller, and how he became a hitman, and then the bulk of the movie takes us through his most difficult contract! We see Claude’s first few jobs, including a very nicely-done barbershop murder, and the next thing you know he’s a veteran cold-blooded killer-for-hire and on his way to sunny California for an extra-special task!

In California he’s aided and minded by two assistants, Marc and George, who accompany him everywhere as he gets ready to fulfill the contract! Ha ha, but what do you think he wants to do to get ready? That’s right, swim in the ocean, whack a few at the driving range, take in a movie or two, stroll around and see the sights! It drives Marc and George bananas! But he’s the stone-cold expert hit man and they’re just the mob’s bum boys, so they have to take it and like it!

Finally Claude decides to take a look at the person he’s supposed to assassinate, and it turns out to be a lady piano player! Well he’s not too happy about that, and that’s when the plan starts to fall apart and beads of sweat begin to appear on the formerly unshakeable Claude’s brow! As you might guess, this being a film noir, things pretty quickly spiral out of control from there, and all under the watchful eye of Lucien Ballard’s chrome-grey camerawork!

This is a really enjoyable picture, filled with fascinating detail, not so much of the hit man’s methods or of his philosophy, but just of the times! The two actors who play Marc and George are unfamiliar to me, but they play their frustration as high comedy and it works very effectively! They make for a good team, and you almost feel sorry for them as Claude seems to be deliberately trying to drive them nuts for no good reason!

There’s an excellent guitar score that reminded me of the zither music from The Third Man, and I’ll bet it’ll remind you of that very same thing! It works perfectly in this movie, though! And there’s a great climax that involves being in a storm drain, but I won’t ruin it for you by describing it further! I’ll just say that I think you’ll enjoy this small gem of a gangster flick, and I give it three exploding television sets!

Burl reviews Skyline! (2010)

Ah ha ha, it’s me, Burl! I thought I’d review a newer alien picture that I watched the other day! It’s called Skyline and it was made by two brothers who usually do trick effects in other people's movies! These guys apparently financed the picture themselves and shot it almost entirely in the Marina Del Rey condo that one of them lives in!

I’m sure you’re wondering “Ha ha, Burl, why would you watch a movie like that? Don’t you know it won’t be worth a cruickshank?” Well, having heard the background information on the movie, I sort of started thinking of it as a modern-day, California version of a Don Dohler backyard-Baltimore alien caper! And I wondered what something like that would be like!

Well, ha ha, it’s not too good! It seems that a group of fairly dumb people are getting together in Los Angeles for a birthday party! The party takes place in the condo, of course, and then, after we’ve gotten to know the characters enough to realize we don’t like them very much, the alien braineaters make their move! Dazzling blue lights fall from the sky and zombify anyone who dares stare into them! And then you float up into the sky and are hoovered into one of the massive spacecraft which hover over the city at what must be precisely the altitude prescribed by the FAA or someone, since that’s where all the alien spacecraft squat, from V to Independence Day to all the rest of these kinds of movies!

The movie follows these characters as they try to escape the nefarious space creatures, who have different forms and are hard to tell apart from their space buggies if you want the truth! The backyard nature of this particular picture, and the general stupidity of its characters, means that every attempt to leave the building is stymied pretty quickly, and the movie takes on a vaguely Sartrean or maybe Buñuelian aspect as the characters try again and again to exit the building, only to find themselves back in that same condo, engaging in the old Night of the Living Dead debate about whether to hole up and wait for help or make some attempt to escape! It gets tiresome pretty quickly, since if you’ve ever seen a siege picture the same argument will seem to have been raging long before the movie even began!

Eventually, after a valiantly stupid rooftop fight against the aliens, where the main fellow, the dumbest one of all, ends up punching wildly at the alien middle-school wimp-fight style, the two main characters end up in a spaceship where they discover the true reason behind the aliens’ invasion, which is in the nature of a snack run! The E.T.s reminded me of Vermicious Knids, and their antics were initially interesting since they seem more like animals than super-advanced conquerors of the universe; but the last scenes of the picture rapidly become extremely silly, and one is grateful to see it come to an end!

It’s not a total loss, though! Sure it tries much too hard and is never scary or exciting or awe-inspiring in the way it intends to be, and the effects, which are near-constant in the movie’s second half, have a weightless quality that drains them of import; but it still manages a couple of nice images, and though you think about legions of glasses nerds chained to render farms rather than a few sci-fi geeks freezing their buns off in a Baltimore backyard, that Dohler can-do spirit I love so well can still be detected faintly around the margins of this bombastic but boring butterberry of a picture! Also, the movie features a performance from the actor Robin Gammell, who’s so good in Rituals and Bells! Ha ha, I was surprised to see him! I give Skyline one single annoying girlfriend!

Burl reviews Whodunit?! (1982)

Hi, ha ha, hi, it’s Burl here! Over several of my recent reviews I’ve been assembling something of a slasher movie taxonomy, and I’ll continue breaking the genre down for you now! We’ve heard about Makeup Effects movies and Non Makeup Effects Movies; we’ve heard tell that some slasher movies are very blue looking; we know that sometimes the killer is hideously deformed and sometimes not! Well, here’s another categorization for you: sometimes the identity of the killer is known from the beginning, and sometimes it’s intended as a mystery!

Whodunit?, as should be pretty evident from the title, is a slasher of the latter sort! Like Madman it's very blue in appearance (it was shot, and also produced, by Thomas Spaulding, whose most famous cinematography credit is the original 1958 The Blob, ha ha!) and features a few gruesome makeup effects! So that’s where it sits in the pantheon; but, since the odds are that you’ve never seen this rather obscure picture, you’re probably more particularly wondering 1) what it’s about, and 2) if it’s any good!

Well, it’s about a group of people gathering on an island somewhere – it reminded me of the island from The Slayer, actually – to shoot some kind of up, up with people sort of a movie, about young people putting on a big show in an uncle’s barn or something! They’re just there to rehearse actually, in preparation for the shoot! Anyway, some mysterious person starts playing the most repetitive, annoying rocknroll song ever on a little cassette player, and then this whoever-it-is kills according to the manner suggested by the lyrics of the song! Boiling, chopping, burning, sawing – all of this mayhem occurs in the dumb song, and that’s what happens to this group of silly people!

There’s a misanthropic musician, a mean, bitter girl on crutches, a fresh-faced debutante, a glasses nerd, a he-man, and many more, including the foolish movie director named Mr. Phlegm! That’s right, I should mention that the movie tries to be a bit of a comedy too, but fails pretty completely at that! There’s a bunch of novelty killing though, which always makes things more interesting than simple pokes with a knife! One fellow gets boiled in a swimming pool! Ha ha, how do you get a whole swimming pool to boil unless there are some kind of supernatural forces at work, like in This House Possessed? An unlucky lady gets a battery acid shower, and there are several pokings, an axing and a chainsawing! I think someone even gets blown up!

Then there’s a lot of running around the deserted structures on the island, and after that a twist ending! It’s not the most unexpected twist in the world, but it’s not bad either! There were long stretches when it seemed like this movie would never end, the script and acting are bad and that terrible song is annoying, but even with all that, it’s not the worst movie in the world! At least it tries, which is more than you can say for some movies of its ilk! I’m going to give it one and a half glasses nerds – the half coming after the unfortunate glasses nerd runs into the business end of an axe, ha ha!

Burl reviews Human Desire! (1954)

Ha ha, hello there! It’s Burl! Have I ever told you how much I appreciate the films of Fritz Lang? Probably! But have I told you how feverishly I enjoy the microgenre of train movies? I don’t think I have! I’ve always admired the great Runaway Train, and when I saw the fantastic John Frankenheimer movie The Train, I knew I had seen something special! Of course I really like train-set murder mysteries like Murder on the Orient Express or The Lady Vanishes, or even comedies like Silver Streak and The Darjeeling Limited, but I particularly like train movies where there’s tons of insider detail on the mechanics of running trains! The Frankenheimer picture is certainly like that!

And so is Human Desire, which you’ll be pleased to hear is a Fritz Lang train movie! In fact it’s a choo-choo noir, which is a great and natural combo, ha ha! It’s based on Émile Zola’s novel La Bête Humaine, but the story was changed around quite a bit! Instead of a psychotic woman-hating killer of ladies, the main character, played here by Glenn Ford, is now a fairly goody two-shoes Korean War veteran train engineer who becomes a typically noir-ish obsessive man-patsy weakling in the blink of an eye, and then towards the end returns to his earlier persona in another blink! Ha ha, they also remove the train crashes and multiple murders at the end, which is too bad! I’ll have to check out the Jean Renoir version to see if they stay truer to the book!

But this movie has plenty of its own virtues! It’s set mostly in and around the train yards of some unidentified small town, and begins with Glenn Ford returning from war and starting back at his old train engineer job! He stays at his old buddy’s house, where the buddy’s beautiful daughter has a crush on him! But meanwhile, Broderick Crawford, the deputy assistant yard master, has been fired from his job and gets his wife Gloria Grahame to meet with a powerful man of her acquaintance in order to get it back!

But Broderick Crawford (whom of course we know from The Vulture) is insanely jealous, and gets it into his head that his wife has had an affair with this rich man, and so, with her unwilling complicity, he pokes the guy with a knife one night on a train! Glenn Ford happens to be on this train too, smoking, and he pretty quickly falls in love with Gloria Grahame! It’s a little unbelievable how quickly it happens actually – blink and you’ll miss it! I must have blinked, in fact! As their love develops, monster-hubby Broderick becomes a meaner and more pitiful drunk, eventually losing his job once again! Glenn, pixilated by love, plots a murder, but it doesn’t quite go as planned! Of course it all ends on the train, but not in the way that I expected!

Well, as far as Fritz Lang goes, this is no M, that’s for sure! It’s not even a Big Heat, which he made a year earlier and which also starred Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame! As I’ve mentioned, the Ford-Grahame romance is kind of unbelievable, and maybe it’s that Ford just wasn’t able to radiate that cowardly pushover desperation vibe that’s so vital to noir men in this situation! You’d think if Fred MacMurray could do it anyone could, but I guess it’s just not that easy! There’s also a little bit of sloppy mise-en-scene here and there in the movie, which is very unlike our Uncle Fritz!

The main problem I think is that Lang just plain didn’t believe in this picture! He didn’t even like the title, for which I don’t blame him one bit – it should have been called That’s Railroading, which is a great line we hear from a minor character early in the film! Also, there was disagreement between Lang and his producer, Jerry Wald, over just what la bête humaine actually was! Lang thought it referred to the beast inside all humans, whereas Wald though it meant women were the human beasts! And so they try to cram the Gloria Grahame character into the typical scheming femme fatale mould when she’s actually not that at all!

No, her character gets a real raw deal in this picture! She tells a few fibs and attempts a little manipulation, but mostly is on the level and is just trying to get by! She gets stymied by nasty men at every turn and I’m sad to report that it doesn’t end very happily for her! I have to say, I don’t think it was very fair! No, not fair at all! But because I love all the train stuff and because there’s plenty of good acting – Broderick maybe overdoes the drunk act a bit, but he and Ford and especially Gloria Grahame are all very solid – I give Human Desire three deadhead trips back home!

Burl reviews Madman! (1982)

Hi, it’s Burl with another early-80s slasher movie review for you! I have to tell you, there’s a certain sort of slasher movie I always enjoy, and those are the types with the blue cinematography! That is to say that night isn’t pitch black, as it is in so many such movies (overly black more often than not, as though they weren't able to rent enough lights), but rather a bright, shiny blue! A good example of this is The Prowler; another is Sorority House Massacre, and yet a third is the somewhat rare Whodunit!

But the bluest of them all is Madman, which takes place entirely at night – no, not one second of daytime in this picture! – and gets a lot of mileage out of the almost otherworldly azure cast of the woodsy outdoors which are the domain of its lumbering, deformed antagonist, Madman Marz! It's worth noting too that under blue light, blood - at least fake blood anyway - looks practically black!

I tend to categorize this sort of movie more than they perhaps deserve, you’ll notice, and elsewhere I’ve discoursed on slasher movies with and without Special Makeup Effects (“with” being generally superior of course), but here’s another division for you: movies whose maniacs are deformed and those who are not! Putting aside the slightly nasty suggestion that terrible injury or deformation makes you automatically homicidal, I’ll say that I usually prefer the maniacs to be a little on the grotesque side! Jason, Cropsy and the big guy from The Prey all qualify! And Madman Marz, whose nose has been bitten off, whose face was cleft in twain by an axe, and who wasn’t anybody’s dream date to begin with, fits that bill as well! Ha ha, imagine a Mount Rushmore with those guys on it!

Madman takes place at a camp for special gifted children, and opens with a very effective campfire spook story telling the tale of Marz, who, legend has it, will return to stalk the woods if his name is spoken above a whisper! One especially special gifted child, Ritchie, takes the dare and shouts insults at Marz from the presumed safety of the campfire! Oh, foolish Ritchie! Soon enough the portly maniac has risen from his farmhouse lair and is preparing to generously dole out the chop!

Meanwhile a strange-looking and not entirely sympathetic counselor named T.P. engages in some hot tub shenanigans with the lady from Dawn of the Dead! But soon people begin to disappear, one by one, as the heavy hand of Marz comes down on them! Ha ha, it gets pretty spooky now and then, as when Ritchie spots Marz staring at them from a perch in the trees! It doesn’t seem likely that such a hefty, overall-clad psychopath could demonstrate such agility, but it’s still a chilling image!

The movie gets pretty bloody too, which is a point in its favor! Ha ha, at one point Marz manages a fancy decapitation simply by jumping on the hood of a truck! He’s also pretty handy with an axe, a rope or just his bare hands! And Marz is one of the more primal maniacs of the genre – he’s so filthy and horrible and murderous that he’s practically a Bigfoot or something! He certainly doesn’t dispense quips with his mayhem – all he does is produce sounds like a Wookee making sweet love to an Ewok!

I’ll give this enjoyable but very minor picture two T.P. belt buckles! It has some bad acting and some worse dialogue, but it’s about as basic a summer camp maniac movie as you can get, as primal as its maniac, and that’s some sort of achievement I guess! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Famous T & A! (1982)

Burl coming at you with a review of one of those clip movies! Ha ha, you probably remember those things – they made quite a few of them back in the 1980s, mostly of horror movies! There was Terror on Tape, Terror in the Aisles, Filmgore, The Best of Sex & Violence and It Came From Hollywood, and probably more! They would usually have host segments featuring people like Donald Pleasance or Nancy Allen or John Candy or Cameron Mitchell or John Carradine or Elvira or Cheech and Chong, and then there would be clips from various movies, sometimes organized into themes or sometimes just random!

Famous T & A, hosted solo by Sybil Danning, has its own general theme, which is the boobs and bums of semi-famous and not-so-famous ladies of the silver screen! Other than that it seems to have been organized much in the manner that Jackson Pollock organized his paint droplets! The whole thing opens with Sybil putting on some sexy golden-tin armor and waving a sword around, and then she intones some crazy, sometimes factually incorrect monologues about the beautiful ladies who have dazzled us with their pulchritude! We then get clips from movies like Tanya’s Island, Slave of the Cannibal God, Sweet Sugar and Truck Stop Women, occasionally broken up by some more sword-waving from Sybil!

A few of the clips come in the form of trailers, particularly for The Single Girls, and for Terminal Island and Sweet Sugar we actually get multiple takes of the same scene, complete with slate! They aren’t bloopers or anything like that, just different takes of the same shot! Not very enlightening, ha ha!

All in all, it’s kind of a boring cruickshank of a motion picture! The video box implies that we’ll see all sorts of now-famous people in various states of undress, and sure, we do see naked ladies, but they somehow manage to drain that experience of any prurient interest whatever! Ha ha, quite a feat! But some of the ladies listed don’t even appear in the movie, I’m pretty sure! And worst of all perhaps is the stuff they make Sybil Danning say! My gosh, it makes the end credits of Howling II seem like a exercise in dignified solemnity by comparison! The poor woman – I hope she was at least well paid!

Because I enjoyed a couple of the trailers – I have a weakness for trash-movie trailers, I have to admit! – and because they run the tail credits over a painted, clenched buttocks, I award this stultifying bore a single tit maniac!

Burl reviews Dune! (1984)

It is by Burl alone I set my review in motion! Ha ha, it's me to review a science-fiction spectacular! I guess Dune didn’t do all that well at the box office when it came out back around Christmas of 1984! Ha ha, it was no Star Wars, that’s for certain! I’m not even sure it was a Flash Gordon or a Last Starfighter! But it was and always shall be a Dune, which is to say among the strangest and most unique science fiction pictures ever made!

Ha ha, it still amazes me that David Lynch was hired to direct this mammoth project, given that he’d only made two feature films before this, and one of them was an impenetrable art movie that took him ten years to complete! But I’m glad he was! Of course, there were other attempts to make Dune before this, most famously the Alejandro Jodorowsky kick at it, which would have been crazy that’s for sure! I think Ridley Scott was going to try as well, which is less exciting; but if it had happened during his Alien / Blade Runner phase and not his Somebody To Watch Over Me period, it might have been something pretty special!

A lot of people mourn the non-existence of these versions, and Dino De Laurentiis was probably among them, ha ha, but I’m pretty happy with this Lynch one! It would have been nice if he’d been allowed to make it as long as he wanted, but it had to be 137 minutes and not a second longer, so they could fit in two shows a night! Too bad, because you can really see the forced compression in the final product!

I don’t know if there’s anyone reading this who doesn’t know the plot, but here it is in even more of a nutshell than Lynch had to put it! It’s the future, and there’s a really valuable spice that everyone wants, more precious than cardamom! You can only get it on planet Dune, and the good Atredies and the nasty Harkonnen families both want to control it! But Paul Atredies is destined to be the king of the universe no matter what the bald witches, Emperor Toulouse-Lautrec or the space slugs say, and the race of leather daddies who live in the desert and their giant pet worms have their own opinions on all these matters; and later it rains!

You can see how it would be hard to fit all that into just over two hours and make all the crazy detours you’d want to make if you were David Lynch! Ha ha, thank goodness for Transcendental Meditation! No, he wasn’t entirely successful, but he made a good fist of it, as they say, and the movie certainly looks fantastic! I love the brassy look it all has, and the supporting cast is almost too excellent, since most of them get pretty short shrift when it comes to screen time! Why hire an Oscar winner like Linda Hunt if you’re just going to have her creep fearfully into a room and then leave again? Well, I’m sure that wasn’t the plan, but that’s how it turned out!

And there’s some good creatures in here, thanks to that old rascal Carlo Rambaldi! The worms are amazing of course, and I always wondered what would happen if, as is suffered by one of the characters, you got eaten by one! And who, I wonder, would win in a fight, a sand worm or The All-Consuming Sarlacc from Return of the Jedi? Meanwhile, the space slugs who control the universe, but are really little more than glorified bus drivers, are particularly gross! But even grosser is the Baron Harkonnen, who I’m not even sure was a Carlo Rambaldi creation or not! Certainly he looks even worse than that famous piece of poo, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial!

For giving it a darn good try even if it could have been so much better, I award Dune three incredibly bushy eyebrow guys with smeared lipstick! But I do have one question: How did Toto of all rock groups get the job of doing the score, and why didn’t they do any more movie work? Ha ha, they did a pretty good job with this one!

Burl reviews Fatal Games! (1984)

Well hello! It’s Burl here with, what else, a review for you! Ha ha, I can’t really defend this strange affection I have for early-80s slasher movies, but I’ve got a case of it for true, and it’s not going away! I don’t like them all unreservedly or anything – often they can be boring or just plain dumb! In fact, most of the time they are, but still, I have an appreciation for them that nobody can take away!

Anyway, Fatal Games is one of the more obscure of these pictures, and though the copyright date says 1984, it seems like it was made even earlier! It takes place at some kind of athletics academy where, throughout the first act, a series of characters qualify for “The Nationals,” and happy they are about it too, for The Nationals are just one step removed from a spot on the Olympic team! (Maybe that’s why this was released in 1984, to capitalize on the ’84 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles! Ha ha, very clever! I wonder if it worked!)

At any rate, somebody who is a very good javelin thrower apparently has a grudge against these Nationals qualifiees and begins spearing them and hiding their transfixed corpses in the lockers! These disappearances arouse only the mildest concern among their peers and the school’s four staff members, and in the meantime the gymnastics and copious nudity continue! Ha ha, if you ever wanted to see naked ladies, this is the movie for you! There’s lots of them in here!

 

The movie pretty much follows all the slasher film conventions, which is more or less a good thing! I have a little checklist of values for these things though – strictly mental – and one of the items I look for is whether or not there’s any actual gore! I’m not what you’d call a goremonger, but I think it’s part of the contract these pictures make with their audiences: there should be a little bit of the red stuff! And I don’t just mean a few drops of stage blood or a retractable knife, I mean special effects that actually have to be made and applied and filmed with some panache! Halloween, as I mentioned in the review of that excellent picture, doesn’t have any such things, but that’s a very special case! A movie like this one or Final Exam or Sorority House Massacre really skates on thin ice by ignoring that simple obligation!

You can usually tell simply by glancing at the credits and seeing if there was someone in charge of Special Makeup Effects! If not, chances are you’re getting a pretty dry picture, and I guess Fatal Games fits that bill! However, with all that said and my rant at an end, I must say that I truly enjoyed this goofy little number nonetheless! Sure, it would have been nice to have a little variation in the killings, as there are lots of possibilities when it comes to athletic equipment (you can see a picture called Graduation Day for an example of some of them – ha ha, spiked football!), but the general amusing goofiness on display here makes up for it! And the revelation of who is doing all the killing has to be seen to be believed! Though to be sure, it’s not the only time this particular motive has been tried on for size in a movie like this, but it might be the funniest such attempt!

For doggedly hitting almost all the slasher movie marks, for giving us a marvelously terrible theme song (“Take it to the limit and don’t look back now /  Take it all the way / No second chance, you’re on your own now / Winning isn’t everything / Winning is the only thing / Ha ha!”) and for providing some pretty excellent javelin murder scenes, even if they are a bit dry (couldn’t one of them have gone through someone’s head or something?), I give Fatal Games one and a half trips to The Nationals!

Burl reviews Bad Meat! (2011)

Hi, Burl here to review a crazy new horror picture! This one is called Bad Meat, and it was apparently shot in bits and pieces over the last few years, and stitched together much in the manner of your classic Frankenstein Monster! You can really tell that it was a tinkered-with production, but I have a soft spot for those special sorts of movies which, because of whatever problems that happened to have come up, are put together by different groups of people into a unique new movie that no one could have planned or predicted, and to which no particular authorial voice can be ascribed! It’s as though the Fates themselves made the movie, ha ha!

The picture begins with a spooky sequence in a hospital room, where a totally unidentifiable bandaged mummy of a patient tells, or rather types out, his or her story of how he or she got that way! It seems there was a terrible discipline camp out in the woods somewhere that was staffed by Nazis, wrestlers and she-devils, and these meanies terrorized a group of teenagers who had been sent there by their presumably nasty parents!

Well, they’re an unpleasant enough group of councilors, and are led by a neo-Nazi played by Mark Pellegrino from Mulholland Drive, but they get even worse when the cook feeds them some spoiled meat! For whatever reason this turns them into crazed flesheaters who vomit all over, fart a lot, and chase the kids hither and yon, hoping to pop them into a stewpot next! Meanwhile the kids, who are an argumentative bunch indeed, have to learn to somehow work together to escape or vanquish the hideous flesheaters!

It all ends rather suddenly in the middle of an attack! I guess we’re to assume the nasty bunch won out in the end, leaving only a single victim alive, but so hideously injured as to be absolutely unidentifiable; and that the final horror we take home with us is the thought of that poor person trying to recuperate, just as all those poor people deformed by chimp attacks have to! At least that’s what I took away from it, and I have to admit it gave me the willies!

This movie’s sure gross! There are some gory bits of course, but worse still is all the chunder and poo that splashes around everywhere! Yuck! And the beef stew that causes all the trouble is also very disgusting, and of course so are the characters and situations! You can almost smell the terror! So on that level, which is a pretty base level indeed, the movie succeeds!

Dramatically, perhaps not so much! I guess it never really was finished, but as I said, I don’t really mind that, and am personally pretty fascinated by these pariah dog pictures! The inconclusive ending gives the whole thing a strange avant-garde aura that I suspect is better than what we’d have gotten if the movie had been completed as planned!

Still, I’m not going to give the thing a totally ringing endorsement! It’s for certain very specific tastes only, and you probably know who you are! I’ll just say that this is a bizarre, perverse and ultimately compelling exercise in filmmaking at random! I give it two exploding pillows!

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!