Burl reviews Rubin & Ed! (1991)

Well hello there, stranger! It’s Burl! I’m here to review a picture that many of you won’t have seen or even heard of, and yes, I’m talking about Rubin & Ed! Ha ha, it’s a buddy picture, and a little bit of a road movie too, and it’s set in Utah to boot, just like Sweater Girls and The Boogens; and while neither buddy, road nor Utah pictures are in my list of top movie subgenres of all time, I can certainly appreciate them when they’re done well!

Rubin & Ed will remind viewers of catholic tastes a little bit of the Gus Van Sant movie Gerry, in which two guys drive out to the middle of nowhere for reasons that are at best hazy, and then start walking through the desert toward some ambiguous goal, having nonsensical conversations all the while! Ha ha, that’s pretty much what happens here! Ed, played by Johnny Fever from WKRP, is a lifelong loser whose last chance for success and self-respect, he thinks, will come from a guru-like sales seminar, and so to achieve his sales goal he tries to recruit Rubin, a reclusive longhair in mourning for his recently deceased cat, into the obviously shady sales organization! It goes without saying that Rubin is played by Crispin "Friday the 13th part 4" Glover, ha ha!

Next thing you know, Rubin and Ed are marching through the desert with the dead frozen cat packed in ice! Rubin drinks the melted catwater from the cooler every now and then, or else wrings out his Odor Eaters for further liquid sustenance, while Ed just gets thirstier and thirstier! Eventually Rubin ends up in the Cave of the Echo People and has hallucinations in which his huge shoes get even bigger! And for those who ever wondered why Crispin Glover ever tried to kick David Letterman in the head, this movie will answer all of their questions!

Ha ha, I guess this is what they mean when they talk about cult films! There’s a cult for this one and no mistake, and the watchword among its members is “My cat can eat a who-o-ole watermelon!” I like the film because it’s often pretty funny – a lot funnier than Due Date, which seems to have modeled itself on this one almost as much as on Planes, Trains and Automobiles –  and because it seems possessed of a genuinely humanistic spirit! Both characters seem like they'd be genuinely difficult to get along with, and neither of them change all that much in the end, just to achieve some contrived rapprochement as we see in more mainstream buddy movies, where personalities are often altered completely somewhere in the third act!

Plus I love the dedication Crispin Glover shows! It helps that he’d been doing the character for years before the movie was shot, but nevertheless, there’s no winking and nodding to the audience from Rubin! He’s a genuine eccentric, and a Republican too! Ha ha, somehow that makes sense in the context of the movie, even though I’m fairly sure that by and large Republicans don’t like cats!

I heartily recommend this picture to any and all who appreciate movies which set modest goals for themselves and achieve those goals very handily! I give Rubin & Ed three whole watermelons!  

Burl reviews Billion Dollar Brain! (1967)

It’s me, Burl, with a review of a spy picture for you! Like everyone I was saddened to hear of the death of Ken Russell! He had a pretty good run there for quite a long while, with his biopics and musical movies of the 1970s and his eccentric 80s pictures like Crimes of Passion, Lair of the White Worm and Salomé’s Last Dance and even Gothic! And of course movies like The Devils, Women in Love and Altered States are all plenty of fun! I heard he ended up making pictures in his garage at the end there, using his neighbours as actors, which strikes me as some pretty impressive dedication to the craft!

Billion Dollar Brain is a bit of a standout in his filmography! Ha ha, it’s a spy picture as I mentioned; one of those Harry Palmer movies in fact, like The Ipcress File or Funeral in Berlin! This was the third one to come along in as many years, and thanks to Russell, it’s certainly the weirdest of them! It starts out fairly normally, with former spy Palmer, now apparently a low-rent private eye and played by Michael "The Island" Caine, being forcibly re-recruited into the service by his old boss, and then hired by a supercomputer with the voice of Donald Sutherland to deliver some eggs to Helsinki! Soon Harry’s in Finland hanging out with his old buddy Karl Malden, of Phantom of the Rue Morgue fame, and then in Latvia with the hilarious Oscar Homolka, and now and again he’ll take another phone call from the supercomputer!

Eventually all this traipsing around the beautifully photographed snowscapes of Northern Europe leads Harry to Texas, of all places, to the compound of General Midwinter, a crazy right-wing oil-rich nutbar who fears communism so much he wants to risk World War III by fomenting rebellion in the Baltic states! Ha ha, it’s the same logic employed by another Texas millionaire-moron-warmonger in the run-up to the war in Iraq – surely the people are so hungering for Western-style democracy that at the slightest provocation and with the smallest hint of Western backing, they’ll rise up and do most of the work themselves!

Well, as was the case in Iraq, it doesn’t quite work out that way for the General, and there’s a massive climactic sequence of chaos on the ice such as was seen in the great Sergei Eisenstein picture Alexander Nevsky! But the curious thing is that neither the supercomputer after which the movie is named, nor the ostensible hero of the piece, Harry, have much to do with it! Harry himself, blundering along after the General, is nearly wiped out along with Midwinter and his army of yankee-doodle fascists in fact, and only escapes by the skin of his teeth!

So there is a fair bit of goofology in the film’s plot and construction, and the curious eccentricities of Ken Russell are certainly evident even at this relatively early point in his career! But the cast is game and the photography very nice, and there are plenty of entertaining details, especially when they get to the actual supercomputer! And, as in Malone, the presence of a right-wing bad guy is sort of appealing, since they seem so much like bad guys in real life! I’m sure there are lots of people across America not so far removed from this General Midwinter guy, even if he seems a bit like a particularly cartoonish villain from the old Batman series! Ha ha, he could be called The Superpatriot or something like that!

Anyway, I enjoyed this picture quite a bit, as I have enjoyed most of Ken Russell’s films, and I award it three fantastic wooden ferris wheels!

Burl reviews The Black Cat! (1941)

Ha ha, it’s Burl “in da house!” Today I thought I might review The Black Cat! What’s that? No, not the great 1934 Edgar Ulmer picture starring Boris and Bela! Hmmm? No, not the 80s Lucio Fulci version either! Or the weird 1960s super low budget version! Ha ha, this one was made in 1941, and if it has any actual connection to the Edgar Allen Poe story after which it is ostensibly named, it flew right by ol’ Burl!

Bela is in this one though, I should note! I wonder how many other stars appeared in two totally different films that have the same titles? Not many, I’d guess! And do you know what else: Basil Rathbone is in this picture, and later on made another version, an animated short, with that very same title! So two of the stars of this Black Cat also appeared in two totally different movies also called The Black Cat; and on top of that Rathbone also appeared in Roger Corman’s Tales of Terror, an omnibus picture that featured a segment called The Black Cat! Ha ha, that’s the vicissitudes of Hollywood for you!

But on to this version! As I mentioned, Bela is in this movie, lurking around the edges mostly, just as he did in Night Monster! Here he’s not a butler though, but a gardener, and again serves as just about the most obvious red herring you could conceive of! The plot concerns a rich, ailing old lady who loves cats – but not black cats, the racist! – and is surrounded by her vulture-like relatives who are waiting to grab her fortune the moment she croaks! One of them seems quite willing to help her along!

Broderick Crawford, of The Vulture, appears in the Lon Chaney Jr. role of the husky, romantic but rough-around-the-edges dupe – he’s a real estate agent who hopes to broker the sale of the house and its contents, but he’s not as rapacious as the others! Along for the ride is the comic relief, Mr,. Penney, an antique dealer who wants to sell off the old lady’s furniture! His running gag is that he believes antiques can be sold for more if they’re damaged, so he goes around scratching and scraping and breaking the various pieces, and admonishing the movers for being too careful with the items! It’s not quite as tiresome as the comic relief often found in these old dark house pictures, but only just!

These fellows I’ve mentioned and a whole lot of others all get trapped in this house by a rainstorm, and of course there’s a murderer loose! The eventual solution to the mystery is highly unlikely, but ha ha, I guess that’s the point! It’s not a great picture, and you could fairly accuse it of wasting Bela, and the comedy gets on your nerves, but it looks fantastic, the cast is game and it has a few spooky or at least atmospheric sequences, so I can’t judge it too harshly! And after all, it runs barely more than an hour, so it doesn’t take too much of your time even if you hate it! I’m going to give this version of The Black Cat two poisoned bowls of milk, and I’ll try to get to the 1930s and 1960s iterations sometime very soon!  

Burl reviews Streets of Fire! (1984)

Burl talkin’! It’s time to have a look at a crazy cult classic that I finally caught up with: Streets of Fire! This is in some ways the action genre’s One From the Heart, namely an expensive, highly stylized, colour-saturated, music-filled, weakly-plotted, hermetically-sealed, labour of love super-flopperoo! Ha ha, nobody went to see it when it came out in the summer of 1984, and it’s no wonder Walter Hill had to move on from this picture to a bland would-be crowdpleaser like Brewster’s Millions!

But Streets of Fire is by far the more interesting movie! Ha ha, it claims off the hop to be “A Rock n’ Roll Fable,” and I guess that’s as good a description of it as anything! It takes place in a neon netherworld where people listen to a weird hybrid of 80s and 50s rock music and wear poodle skirts and grease their hair back! The action begins when a superstar lady warbler is kidnapped right off the stage by a loutish group of bikers, led by Willem Dafoe, who sports a truly astonishing pair of garbage pants!

So of course Michael Paré, the songstress’s ex-boyfriend, is called in to solve the problem! He's tough and cool, but also tends to pout like an eight year old much of the time! With the help of a tough-talking lesb*an and a doo-wop group, as well as a perpetually angry glasses nerd played by Rick Moranis, Paré fights Willem and his gang until, naturally, the whole affair comes down to a mano-a-mano sledgehammer fight! Ha ha, that’s how these things always end up, isn’t that true!

In the background, Rick Moranis, dressed like a 1950s nerd, hops around spewing venom! I guess he’s supposed to be overcompensating for his nerdly insecurities, and in the process, he actually becomes just about the most well-rounded character in the entire movie! The other most interesting character is Amy Madigan, who plays some sort of soldier lady who just won’t fall for Michael Paré’s charms! He’s a real pretty boy, so most of the other ladies in the movie, except his sister, consider him pure catnip!

It’s an interesting experiment of a movie, and I guess was closer to the comic-book craziness that Hill had envisaged for The Warriors! But the story is really weak tea, and the narrative, such as it is, essentially comes to a close halfway through! I know the thing’s supposed to be a fable, with the characters being types and nothing more, but in the end, dramatically speaking, it just doesn’t satisfy!

But it satisfies in a whole lot of other ways! The movie looks great, the music’s not too bad – it’s no Phantom of the Paradise, but it’s still much better than most movies where a character is supposed to be a great rock star – and the whole enterprise just feels slightly crazed and out of control! And, ha ha, I surely do like that in a movie! This is one of those grand, soaring cinematic Icari that books such as Mr. Rabin’s My Year Of Flops mean to celebrate, and if Mr. Rabin hasn’t covered this movie, he sure should consider it!

I give Streets of Fire three broken down tour busses!

Burl reviews The Boogens! (1981)

Hello! It’s your good friend Burl! I thought I’d review a movie about the monsters you might be unlucky enough to find if you go around opening up old mines in the Utah mountains! This picture’s called The Boogens, and it has the reputation of being a movie well-regarded by the famous spookbook author Stephen King!

Well, it’s not an all-time classic maybe, but I can see why somebody might consider this an underrated booga-booga movie of its era! It concerns a couple of guys who hook up with two amiable, rough-hewn older gentlemen to open up a long-abandoned silver mine, which, some fake newspaper clippings in the title sequence tell us, was the scene of mysterious attacks and cave-ins that claimed the lives of several miners! And the two guys have some girlfriends, and the four of them are all staying in a lonely mountain cabin not too far from the mine!

Well, after some dynamite is set off, what do you think is released from the previously sealed areas of the mine? You guessed it, boo-boo-Boogens! These are tentacled, vaguely turtle-like critters which scuttle about looking for victims! There’s a spooky sequence early in the picture involving a woman alone in the cabin, where she is of course menaced by boogens, which have come into her basement via tunnels that were purposely built there for some reason! And of course it all comes down to a lot of running through the tunnels of the mine, trying to evade the toothy varmints!

There are quite a few entries in the mine/cave horror subgenre – this, The Strangeness, My Bloody Valentine, the Descent films and more – and there are two potential flaws endemic to the form: impenetrable darkness resulting from the underground setting and the tediously repetitive creeping through rocky shafts that all look the same! The Boogens has generally decent lighting, which was a pleasant surprise, and while it has no shortage of the standard issue cave-creeping, it mixes things up a bit by the inclusion of an underground cavern with a lake in it!

There are a few good sequences and the characters are quite likeable, thanks mainly to the unexpectedly strong performances! But at the same time, there’s some real wasted potential in this picture! It’s stated at one point that there are tunnels leading from the mine to every house in town, which would seem to be the set up for multiple boogen attacks of all sorts of different people! But we don’t get such boogen attacks – two of our four young people, the two older guys, the lady in the house, an old doom-crier fellow in the vein of Crazy Ralph from the first two Friday the 13^th pictures, and a yappy dog are the boogens’ only victims! And maybe six victims and a little pooch sounds like a lot, but somehow there nevertheless seems to be great attack-free stretches in the movie during which you want to grab the picture by the lapels and remind it that, after all, it’s a monster movie! Ha ha, bring on the boogens! I call for more boogens!

Still, it’s not like it doesn’t try to deliver the goods! There’s a bit of nudity, unusual for a Utah-based production (this and Sweater Girls are the only two Beehive movies I can think of with boobs in them), and some of the attack scenes are even a little gory! I thought this picture had a lot of heart, and that’s worth a fair bit to ol’ Burl!  Plus I’d like to say that the dog in this movie gives one of the single greatest canine performances I’ve ever seen! I could recommend it just for him, actually, and was sad when he became boogenmeat! I give this effort three not completely wrapped bath towels!

Burl reviews House of Psychotic Women! (1973)

Hi, Burl here with some Iberian horror for you! Ha ha, the Spaniards have a long tradition of spookshows, and one of their most famous monstermen was Paul Naschy, aka Jacinto Molina, who often played a troubled werewolf named Count Waldemar (as he did in The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman), or else he fought mummies, sorceresses or yetis! Monster trouble was a regular staple of his working life, and his refrigerator-like body was often pushed to its very limits by their incessant attacks, or by his own lycanthropic transformations!

But there weren’t always monsters in his pictures! This one, for instance, as promised by the title, features a dwelling inhabited by neurotic ladies, and is informed by the then-popular giallo black-gloved killer films being produced in Italy! (The movie is better known these days under its original, more giallo-esque title Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll!) Old Jacinto plays an ex-con with a history of violent behaviour who, in his quest for employment, finds himself working as a handyman in the titular structure! The ladies in question are three sisters who each have their own dire problems, which are not necessarily solved by Jacinto’s arrival! However, as in movies like Forbidden World, we find that his janitorial duties include quite a bit of, ha ha, “troubleshooting!”

But there are also murders afoot of course, all enacted to the strains of Frère Jacques, which is a song I had to sing a lot in school when I was but a young sprout! That added a strange aura to the proceedings, I must say! The murders are all of pretty young blonde ladies, and involve the gruesome post-mortem removal of the victims’ eyes! Ha ha, yikes! But who could be behind this killing frenzy? Could be Jacinto, or one of the psychotic women, or any of a number of other characters! The final answer is slightly convoluted, as always in these pictures, but also entertainingly goofy!

And of course the fireplug presence of Paul Naschy is always a boon to any picture! He helped write the screenplay too, so of course there are numerous scenes where he takes off his shirt and makes love to the beautiful but damaged ladies of the house! But I do have to say I was surprised at his fate in the movie! It’s always nice when something genuinely unexpected happens in an otherwise fairly prescriptive outing! And as it all comes to a climax, so too do the haunting strains of Frère Jacques!

As for the rest of the movie, well, it’s a bit of a daffodil and could really have used a bit more Eurocool style, that being the currency in which your typical giallo prefers to trade! But more often House of Psychotic Women seems to prefer the rather cheap-looking, gritty and zoom-lens happy techniques we see in Jess Franco films and suchlike! Oh well, it makes for an interesting pudding at the very least, and I give this picture two unsafely utilized garden harrows!

Burl reviews Delirium! (1979)

Hi, Burl here with a real obscurity for you! Ha ha, it’s called Delirium, and that is a quality this picture certainly manages to conjure up! It’s always nice to find an unexpected congruence between the title of a movie and the movie itself, even if it’s not entirely what was intended by the filmmakers, ha ha!

Here’s a movie for those times when one of your buddies wants to watch a slasher movie and another one wants to watch a police procedural and still a third would like to see a conspiracy picture! That’s when you triumphantly produce Delirium from your basement and say “Gentlemen and ladies, ha ha, guess what, I can accommodate you all!”

Well, it seems there’s a maniac named Charlie out killing ladies as quickly as he can find them! He spears one through a door, gives another a pretty stiff neck-twist, and pitchforks a third right in the neck! It’s pretty horrendous, and gory in that great fakey late-70s way! He even gives the chop to an innocent delivery boy, yikes!

While all this is happening, a couple of checkered-jacket detectives are on the case, trying to figure out who crazy Charlie is and what he’s going to get up to next! Ha ha, the detectives are a real couple of St. Louis characters, that’s for sure! Did I mention that the movie was filmed in St. Louis? Well, since the St. Louis Arch is visible in just about every shot during the daytime exterior scenes, you probably would have figured that out yourself pretty quickly!

And while all this is happening, we learn about a mysterious cabal of local businessmen – a Star Chamber if you prefer – who see to it that no criminal goes unpunished in the greater St. Louis area! To that end they hold their own little kangaroo courts on the miscreants and then unleash a psycho on them, someone like Charlie! But what’s been happening is that Charlie, their latest psycho-for-hire, being a crazy man, has gone rogue and is doing pleasure killings of his own volition! Ha ha, cabal of businessmen, surprise! Crazy man acts crazy, who’d a thunk it!

A headbald in sunglasses played by someone called “Barron Winchester” is the leader of this star chamber, and by the end of the picture he’s as crazy as Charlie! Both of them have dime store ‘Nam flashbacks, which look more like flashbacks to an abandoned St. Louis drive-in or something! It all kind of comes together in a climax which involves lots of machine guns and exploding blood capsules!

Well, let me tell you, this is one crazy picture! It was made for pocket change and a few of the scenes are too dark to see much, and the performances have a distinctly local theatre group feel, and there’s nothing imaginative or exciting about the filmmaking, but I still got quite a bit of enjoyment out of this loopy daffodil! You’ll notice I’ve said several times that the movie is crazy but haven’t said exactly how, and that’s because I don’t think I can get more specific than that! Maybe it’s just me, I don’t know! But try to get your mitts on a copy, have a look, and we’ll figure it out together! Until then, I’m going to give Delirium two unlucky delivery boys!

Burl reviews For Keeps! (1988)

Hi, Burl here to review a forgotten picture from the 80s! Ha ha, if most of the people have forgotten that Blue City ever existed, then all of the people have forgotten about For Keeps! But I haven’t forgotten about it, because I actually watched them shoot a little bit of this movie way back when, when it was called Maybe Baby! I always wondered how it turned out, and so finally the other day I gave it a look!

Ha ha! Well, Molly Ringwald’s in the picture, and I guess this was the movie she made after falling out with John Hughes, her old pal who put her in so many of those teen 80s movies! Maybe he wanted her for She’s Having A Baby, but she said no, I’d rather do this other movie about someone having a baby! So off she went! She plays a Kenosha, Wisconsin-based high school girl who has a boyfriend named Stan Beefteque, and she and Stan make sweet love one day and we, the audience, get the whole view of what’s going on biologically within them! The scene reminded me of a similar one in the movie Enter the Void, and any of you who have seen that picture will know what I’m talking about!

Molly and Stan have all sorts of post-high school plans! She’s going to Madison to become a journalist and he, an accomplished designer of novelty tents, has an application in to the architecture department at Cal Tech! But of course as soon as they learn there’s a baby on the way, they consider all these plans scuppered! And of course they have to deal with their parents! Stan ends up becoming estranged from his, while Molly’s single mom, unlucky in love herself and embittered, gives unwise counsel!

The couple move into a coldwater flat and have the baby, and from there their lives become harrowing! I had no idea how thickly this movie laid on the drama, but there seems to be shouting in every scene, and after Stan becomes a sullen and shirtless beer-guzzling young husband, roiling with anger inside because he was accepted to Cal Tech but turned them down, it looks like that’s it for the relationship! But wait a minute – is that a happy ending lurking in the wings? No, it’s a somewhat confusingly ambivalent one that appears to believe it’s a happy ending!

I can’t say this movie is any sort of lost classic! It’s from the director of Rocky and The Karate Kid and Joe, and in a way it’s a sort of mixture of all those movies, with a little bit of Guess What We Learned In School Today mixed in! As I say, there’s an awful lot of shouting, and while I’d previously wondered what happened to the guy who played Stan Beefteque, who was a functionally personable and good looking actor, I realize now that he must have blown out his voice on this picture and been unable to star in movies thereafter! Does he consider For Keeps his legacy project? If so, I’m glad at least that I watched it for that reason!

I guess this is an attempt to deal with teen pregnancy in a semi-realistic way, but it’s not much more realistic than a John Hughes movie when you get down to it! And on top of that it’s not really ol’ Burl’s type of picture – I just watched it because I remember when they were making it! I guess I give it one and a half invisible bathroom walls! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Night Monster! (1942)

Hello, hello, it’s Burl! I’m here to review a creepy old Universal picture from the olden days, those innocent wartime days when you could just put together a bunch of people in a scary old house and you'd have a brand new booga-booga movie for the bottom half of the bill!

Of course it helps if some of those people in that scary house are the likes of Lionel Atwill and Bela Lugosi, even if Bela’s just playing a butler! You keep waiting for him to turn into a bat or something, but he’s pretty much just a stiff old butler with a strong sense of loyalty to his employer! Of course we well know that Bela’s abilities ranged far beyond such portrayals, so in a way it’s kind of nice to see him just play a fairly regular if still somewhat creepy guy!

Bela’s far from the main character in this picture! It seems there’s an elderly invalid whose arms are like old batwings, just leathery husks, completely useless, and whose legs are quite simply gone! He got that way in spite of the efforts of a trio of doctors who’ve been invited for the weekend! In addition there’s the invalid’s possibly-mad sister; a lady psychiatrist the sister has invited to see if she’s crazy or just being gaslit by the others in the house; a sinister housekeeper in the Mrs. Danvers mould; a friendly neighbour who writes murder-mysteries; and a be-turbaned swami with weird knowledge of Eastern occult practices! Ha ha, quite a crew!

It was when the swami showed up, and when it turned out that his hocus pocus was of central importance to the narrative, that I began to suspect that here, finally, is another picture in the tradition of The Amazing Mr. X! Ha ha, I really like these movies where a vein of Eastern mysticism makes its way into a spooky All-American situation! I guess I just like that particular chemical mixture!

Of course there are murders – in fact, the murders started before the movie even did! There’s a foggy, froggy swamp near the mansion, and it seems a doctor had been found there, the victim of a pretty stiff neck-twist! And a chambermaid who was going to spill the beans – same thing! And every time the sinister strangler is afoot, all the frogs in the swamp fall eerily silent! Soon the neck-twister is roaming the house, taking care of the very doctors who had failed to save the helpless invalid’s limbs! But it couldn’t be him, could it, somehow taking revenge personally on these sawboneses?

Well, there might just be some limb-regenerating going on, but I don’t want to give too much away! I’ll just say that the concept behind this strangler’s means of locomotion is pretty spooky! This was an altogether enjoyable picture, in fact! If you can get around the idea of Bela playing a supporting butler role, and you like that gleaming monochromatic Universal Pictures atmosphere as much as I do, you might enjoy it quite a bit also! I give Night Monster three empty pant legs and an extra turban jewel to Nils Asther who plays the role of the swami!

Burl reviews Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter! (1984)

Hi, Burl here to look at another one of the famous killer Jason’s crazy machete-waving adventures! I’ve always thought of the Friday the 13^th movies much the way many others think of the Star Trek pictures: namely that it’s the even-numbered ones that are better and more entertaining than the odd! I’m not what you’d call a great big fan of any of them really, but I’ll take II, IV and VI over I, III and V! (I haven’t really sat down and watched the ones after that, except for the one where he goes to hell and the one where he goes to space, both of which I saw in the theatre! But the one with the psychic girl, his grand trip to Manhattan/Vancouver and his match-up with the redoubtable Fred Krueger, along with whatever others there may be, have all passed me by!)

I watched the fourth one again the other day, because I recalled it somewhat fondly, and because Crispin Glover is in it, and, ha ha, he’s great in the picture! He brings a really welcome note of eccentricity to it, probably in spite of any direction he was given, and certainly in spite of anything in the script!

The story is pretty standard! There’s a family who live near Camp Crystal Lake: a single mother, her teenage daughter and her son, the monster-mad Corey Feldman! Also they have an amiable retriever dog, Gordon! Next door to them is a rental property that’s inhabited by a group of kids out for a wild time, and there is also a pair of comely twins who apparently live somewhere nearby! This, with a little skinny-dipping as a garnish, is precisely the formula needed to encourage the murderous rage of Jason! Although he doesn’t seem to need much encouragement, ha ha!

I think the filmmakers really did intend this to be the final chapter of the Friday the 13^th story! Apparently the movie was originally going to end with Jason getting his head frizzle-fried in a sort of microwave oven contraption which Corey Feldman had created for some reason, but they scrapped that because it was too outside of the established M.O. of these movies! Ha ha, if only they could see into the future of the series, with the enraged ambulance driver and the psychic lady and the space stuff and the body-hopping and all that, they’d have known there was room to move with this formula! Anyway, they settled on the famous machete-slide for Jason’s demise, which was still supposed to be pretty final; but of course the picture made quite a few ducats, and they figured out a way to continue the movies anyway!

I still kind of like this movie, because it has Crispin Glover and his insane turkey dance - he's as funny here as in Rubin & Ed - along with some pretty tasty, if abbreviated, Tom Savini trick effects! It also has a few nice directorial flourishes, like the opening shot, which might be the single most ambitious shot of the series with its complex craning and tracking and lighting and choreography, and even a helicopter! On the downside, it has even less well-developed characters than most of these pictures, a dumb script, and The Last American Virgin, who is in the film as Crispin Glover’s “friend” Ted the Computer, and is a really annoying jackass! And can anyone tell me why Gordon the dog jumped out the window like that? And what happened to the mother? Ha ha, so many questions!

I give this picture one and a half lightning-quick haircuts!