Hi, it’s Burl! As you probably know, I’ve been reviewing movies over at another location, namely http://hiitsburl.blogspot.com/ ! It just seems easier to do movie reviews that way! And one thing I like is how that sort of blog tells you what kind of internet searches people did to find your website! Ha ha! I’ve kept track of some of them, and I present them to you here, completely uncensored!

Ha ha, I wonder if some of these people were disappointed when they found ol’ Burl’s website! Anyway, here they are:

attack of the giant leeches

donald duck freddy

dorotty sex film

famous t & a

the fat teen wolf

hot xxx nud grils

giant leech

ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha wolf wolf

its a burl

low budget 1980s movie posters

movie set carnival

pictures of snakes with the names

pictures that will rock my dick

slug teeth

slug with teeth

stitched together monster

ted prior

teen rides big dick

the vulture 1967 movie

you only live twice burl

Hi, Burl here! I’ve moved all my reviews to a different place, namely http://hiitsburl.blogspot.com/ ! All the reviews from this blog have gone there, and all the new reviews will appear there instead of here, so change up your bookmarks accordingly!

Why make such a change, you’re probably asking! Well, this seems like more of a blog to me - and it will continue to be the place where I put amusing photos and daring stories of everyday life! - but the other type of blog is better-suited to reviewing movies! You can leave comments and such, and it’s easier to find the particular titles!

So you can keep checking in here, but if you like these little movie reviews, and I hope you do, the address once again is http://hiitsburl.blogspot.com/ ! Ha ha, thanks very much for reading any of this! See you over at that other place, and occasionally here too!

Hi lads and ladies, it’s your friend Burl! I thought I’d review yet another movie featuring a murderous ape, because I really am pretty fond of those sorts of pictures! Ha ha, hope you’re not tired of them!

So listen, who’s the last person you’d expect to be playing the mad scientist role in a killer ape movie from the 1950s? Probably Marlon Brando! Well, it’s not him in Phantom of the Rue Morgue, but it is the next least likely candidate, Karl Malden! Karl plays a combination zoologist/psychiatrist, which is a professional mash-up we don’t see enough of these days! He’s also a die-hard romantic, deeply in love with his young colleague’s fiancée! And he has access to a killer ape! Ach, that’s a recipe for trouble!

There’s a series of brutal ape murders up and down the Rue Morgue, and much of the picture deals with Police Inspector Bonnard’s confusion at who could possibly be responsible! Neighbors can hear crazy jabbering in what they take to be a foreign tongue, and a man in a nightcap is violently defenestrated, but nobody can catch the maniacal killer! Suspicion soon falls upon the young scientist Paul Dupin, but as much as he protests his innocence, the murders continue and the evidence piles upon him like horse blankets!

Well, eventually things sort themselves out, with the proper human varmints getting their comeuppance, and, as always, the poor ape taking a tumble! I always feel a bit sad for these unlucky simians! Ever since King Kong, or even before that actually, they’ve been handed a pretty raw deal!

Phantom of the Rue Morgue, which of course is a descendant of Edgar Allen Poe’s famous killer ape story, has also been served up a raw deal over the years if you ask ol’ Burl! You can’t find a single positive review of this lush-looking caper, and for my money it’s actually a pretty decent film! There are some fine scenes involving acrobats and other carnival folk, which, in combination with the Parisian setting, give it the feel of a lost chapter out of Children of Paradise! The movie looks great, and the sets are manifique! I think it must have been shot in 3D, like Gorilla At Large, because an awful lot of things get tossed towards the camera!

For all its virtues and for the fact that every single male character (and some of the female ones, ha ha!) has a French-style pencil moustache, I give Phantom of the Rue Morgue two and a half ape-shaped holes in the skylight!

Hello to all my pals! It’s Burl here with a review for you! Sure, it’s another ape movie, like Gorilla At Large or White Pongo, but this one has a bit of a twist to it! Read on, MacDuff, and I’ll explain! Ha ha, but first, be warned! In reviewing Dr. Renault’s Secret, I’ll be revealing Dr. Renault’s secret, and it’s not merely that he doesn’t even own a Renault! It’s hard to talk about the movie without revealing the secret, so I’m a-gonna do it!

It seems that an American doctor has arrived in France to marry Dr. Renault’s niece! All very nice, or so it seems! But the bridge is washed out, and the young fellow must pass the night at a local inn, along with a few other characters! There’s Renault’s hulking gardener, played by Mike Mazurki; another American who happens to be an obnoxious drunk; and finally there’s Noel, a slab-faced fellow of few words, who turns out to be Renault’s manservant!

Well, soon enough there’s a murder! And the next day, after Noel drives the doctor to Renault’s chateau, there’s another killing, this time of a local hound! And then, as Bastille day approaches, a few other people get some pretty stiff neck-twists, or else are completely defenestrated by person or persons unknown! Actually it’s not all that unknown, since we do see Noel perpetrate some of these killings – but not all of them!

So here’s the big secret the doctor’s been keeping: Noel is in fact not a human at all, but a shaved ape who’s been taught to talk! We see a photo album of his journey from fierce-but-happy jungle ape to dour, morning-coated manservant! There are some hilarious mid-transformation pictures of the ape swathed in bandages and looking pretty grumpy about it all! And who can blame him! Dr. Renault has apparently perpetrated this weird science in order to prove some crazy theories of his, and it turns out that he’s not the avuncular figure he first appeared to be, but a whip-cracking martinet! The whole thing ends more or less in classic monster-movie style at the top of an old grist mill, but the monster isn’t necessarily who you thought it would be!

There are a few great things about this movie! One is that the director apparently saw Citizen Kane and liked it well enough to try replicating some of the shots! There are lots of low-angle close-ups of shadowed faces, and some deep focus of the sort we know and love from that movie! Ha ha, I love that kind of thing!

The other great thing is the cast, specifically George Zucco as Renault and J. Carroll Naish as Noel! Both of these guys are associated with cheap, schlocky horror movies, but they’re really good actors, and especially so here! Naish’s performance as the love-besotted Noel is highly sympathetic and rather heart-rending! I give Dr. Renault’s Secret three defenestrations!

Hi, Burl here to review a movie in a subgenre which I should theoretically love, but which for the most part has never thrilled me like it ought! I’m talking about scarecrow movies of course, which have been spooky to me in a more or less academic way ever since I saw that chilling TV movie Dark Night of the Scarecrow as a wee lad! Ever since then I’ve thought that scarecrows have an awful lot of terrifying potential!

Given that, it might seem little strange that I didn’t bother seeing Scarecrows until recently! But in my neck of the woods the only version available was the severely edited cut, with all the gruesome scarecrow mayhem removed! Ha ha, why bother, I thought! One day I’ll get the chance to see it uncut! And that turned out to be absolutely true!

I’d always heard it was a scary movie, and I’ll give it this: it’s scarier than any given episode of the TV show Scarecrow and Mrs. King! And you know, since that’s dam*ing it with some pretty faint praise, I’ll go a step further: it has some nice cornfield atmosphere (despite being shot in Florida!), some pretty interesting gore and a few fairly effective sequences!

The story is a simple one! Some robbers are flying away from their successful if violently concluded heist (unseen, as in Reservoir Dogs) when they experience a betrayal at the hands of an Australian! He parachutes out with the booty, and it’s up to the rest of the bandits, along with their father-daughter pilot hostages, to follow him down into the old cornfield to reclaim the millions! However, they’re not counting on – and you know, no one ever counts on – killer scarecrows!

The scarecrows’ larger agenda is a little obscure, but it involves pulling out people’s guts! They’ll also poke at you a bit with farm implements! The stuffies are apparently three farmer fellows who used to live in the abandoned stilt house which the robbers find in the middle of the field, but, aside from some hints of pagan worship having taken place there at one time, how and why these particular hayseeds became scarecrow men is not revealed! Ha ha, and why are they so darn vicious? We never find out!

But it hardly matters! What matters in this movie is how their viciousness manifests itself, and, thanks to makeup man Norman Cabrera, who was probably extremely overworked on this show, things get pretty bloody! And also, further praise to Mr. Cabrera, the scarecrows look great! The movie itself looks pretty good too, thanks to cinematography from Peter Deming, who also shot great movies like Evil Dead 2 and Lost Highway!

It’s not as scary or as good as I’d been led to believe, but altogether this is a pretty decent bit of late-80s horror! I’d put it on or at least near the level of Pumpkinhead, which I’ll review here soon! (I’m going to try to review all the autumnal horror movies I can through this month, ha ha!) I give Scarecrows two bloody dollar bills!

Hi, Burl here to review an action movie from the 80s about a Vietnam vet who’s been pushed too far! Ha ha, doesn’t really narrow it down, does it? This one’s called Eye of the Tiger, and the Ramboo in question is Buck, played by none other than Gary Busey! (No, that’s not a typo – inspired by a fellow film reviewer, Mr. Bleeding Skull, I call these sorts of characters Ramboos!)

Buck has just been released from prison, where he had apparently been sent without justification by crooked Sheriff Seymour Cassel! He wants only to live his life in peace with his wife and daughter, and to occasionally drink a beer with his pal Yaphet Kotto, but a nasty group of crack-dealing bikers led by William Smith interfere with that plan! (Ha ha, the whole movie I thought the leader of the crack bikers was Vernon Wells from The Road Warrior! But no, it was longtime biker toughguy William Smith!)

Well, before you know it, poor Buck is burying his wife, visiting his daughter in the hospital, and recuperating from his own injuries, all thanks to these nasty bikers! But Buck calls on a favor from an old prison acquaintance, and he’s soon got his hands on a supertruck and a bunch of weapons! Ha ha, it’s vengeance time! For most of the movie Yaphet Kotto stands on the sidelines, unwilling to help his pal (and frankly, I expected that he would be a turncoat before the end of the picture), but by the end he’s dressed up like a WWI flying ace and is dropping grenades on the bikers’ giant Road Warrior-esque crack-camp!

The success of this kind of movie largely depends on one factor: how hateful are the bad guys? Well, here they’re a fairly nasty bunch, so watching Gary Busey get very busy on them is pretty satisfying! And there’s no shortage of bikers to get revenge on – so many, in fact, that at the end there’s still a bunch of them left, but they just put their visors down and putter off to start a new crack-camp in some other burg!

But before that, Buck has decapitated a few of them with wires, blown some others up with grenades, and scared one to death by putting a dynamite up his b*m! There’s some pretty good scenes, all right! And the evil sheriff gets his too! It’s always nice to see Seymour Cassel show up in a movie, and that’s the case here! In fact, I’d say that the cast across the board is strong!

It’s not really a memorable movie, though! Maybe that’s why you don’t hear too much about it these days! It’s got all the faults of the typically reactionary Reagan-era revenge picture, but the strong cast and inventive moments of vengeance help it to stand out a bit! And of course, as is also the case in Rolling Vengeance, a supertruck is always a welcome sight! But I have to take some points away for overusing the theme song, which was stolen from Rocky III anyway! I give Eye of the Tiger one and a half spinning helmet-heads!

Friends, you know it’s me, Burl! I’ve always liked a good Western, with the horses and the gunfights and the wide-open spaces! I guess Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is a Western, though I’ve always thought of it more as an adventure-comedy with bromantic overtones; and in the end I’ve always been more of a Wild Bunch kind of fellow anyhow!

But the prequel to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which came out ten years later and is called Butch and Sundance: The Early Days, is more of a traditional Western by my own special reckoning! Of course it tries to have many of the same elements as its famous and beloved predecessor as it can pack in, or else lightly disguise – it replaces bicycle riding with skiing, for instance – but it has more one-on-one gunfights and horse ridership than I recall being in the original!

The story follows Butch, played by Tom Berenger from Someone To Watch Over Me, as he’s released from jail and meets up with the initially hostile Harry Longabaugh, a young sharpshootin’ bandit later to be renamed Harry the Skunk, and then finally The Sundance Kid! Ha ha, and guess who plays Sundance? That’s right, the Greatest American Hero!

I sometimes wonder about The Greatest American Hero’s career! He had a good role in Carrie, and then another one in Big Wednesday, and then this – it seemed like he was poised on the precipice of becoming a real live movie star! But maybe the TV show where he got his lasting identity as The Greatest American Hero kind of sidelined that for him, I don’t know!

Anyway, back to this weirdly diaphanous film! It’s a little hard to concentrate on it, actually, in the same way it’s hard to concentrate on a scrap of sheer gauze blowing in the wind against a bright white sky! I don’t like to cite other movie reviewers here, but I’ll make an exception for Roger Ebert’s review of this picture, which hits the nail on the head! He admits it’s reasonably well produced, which is true, but asks, in essence, “Ha ha, why was this movie even made? There seems to be no good reason for it!”

Quite right, Roger! It’s okay, but not particularly great, and never very exciting as an adventure movie; and it expects our knowledge of Butch and Sundance’s later adventures, of their great gentlemen’s bond and of their eventual fate, to do all the heavy lifting! There’s fine photography from Laszlo Kovacs and a good supporting cast – Brian Dennehy, Peter Weller, Christopher Lloyd, John Schuck, and even Vincent Schiavelli – but to no particularly wondrous purpose!

Ha ha, I give this wisp of a motion picture one single spraying skunk!

Good day everyone, Burl here! Today I thought I’d catch up on an Ulli Lommel movie I’ve never seen! Actually there are plenty of Ulli Lommel movies I’ve never seen, and most of them I’m pretty sure I never will see! He’s just that prolific, ha ha!

The man’s most famous movie is probably The Boogeyman, which I just might review here for you sometime soon! That one was a minor horror hit back in 1980 or so, and popular enough that he was able to follow it up with a couple of other horror pictures featuring some famous actors! There was Brainwaves, which was some kind of mad scientist movie starring Tony Curtis, Vera Miles and Kier Dullea, and then there was this one, The Devonsville Terror, a witch picture featuring the always-welcome presence of Donald Pleasance, the star of the Halloween pictures and of course Blofeld from the middling Bond adventure You Only Live Twice!

Like any good witch movie, this one starts in the past, with some innocent women being tormented and executed as sorceresses! Well, the foolish townspeople have thereby opened a parcel-package of cursed whoop-a*s on themselves, since their witch problem has now become self-fulfilling! (Some reviews of this movie claim the curse proves the townspeople were right all along that the ladies were witches, but I say they were innocent until wrongly convicted, like any other vengeful spirit you might see in a movie!)

Three hundred years later, the people of Devonsville, or at least the men of the town, are no less foolish! When a trio of new ladies – a schoolteacher, an environmentalist and a radio host – move to town, the good burghers of Devonsville are immediately suspicious of their modern, secular ways and extremely mild feminist tendencies! Ha ha, these guys would probably be members of that crazy “tea party” they have in the United States these days, if it existed in Devonsville in 1983!

Prominent among the townspeople is a shopkeeper, who looks a little like an even pudgier Phillip Seymour Hoffman and who favors vests as his fashion statement of choice! He smothers his wife with a pillow and then sees a pizza face flying at him in the bathroom! This incident, while alarming, doesn’t interrupt his weekly dinners with the local priest, the local hothead, a local little girl and a local stone-faced Claude Akins lookalike!

Meanwhile, Dr. Worley, the local sawbones, is busy sitting in his office pulling worms out of his arm, or else getting people to strip to the waist so he can hypnotize them! Donald Pleasance is Dr. Worley, and they must have filmed all his scenes in one day, because I don’t think he ever leaves his doctor’s office! But he’s great in the role anyway, as Pleasance always was! And he’s a good guy too, not one of the reactionary townsfolk!

There’s almost nothing actually good about The Devonsville Terror though, at least in conventional movie terms! Except for Pleasance and the shopkeeper guy, the acting is terrible! The story is told in a very abstract way, which I have to put down to incompetence rather than avant-garde narrative technique! The pacing is leaden and the movie seems at times to be all talk!

But guess what: I really enjoyed it! There aren’t a lot of movies that can muster a truly effective autumn atmosphere – even Halloween doesn’t get it quite right, since it was shot in an L.A. neighborhood in the summer, using bags of leaves and painted gourds to make it seem like fall! But this one has an excellent overcast look, with skeletal branches etched against a grey cloudy sky and dead leaves skittering down lonely gravel roads! There’s something almost cozy about this weird, boring little movie, and watching it is sort of like putting on a comfy sweater! Also there’s a pretty good ending, with laser eyes and melting heads, which will remind you of the climax of Raiders of the Lost Ark as recreated on a $1.95 budget!

The movie was shot in Rebane Country, which is to say Wisconsin, and indeed Bill Rebane was some kind of associate producer on it! I’ll have to review a few Bill Rebane movies for you here, in case you’re unfamiliar with this unique regional auteur! But for now we’re talking Lommel, and for its cozy fall atmosphere and its determination to stay on the side of the modern, progressive ladies rather than the cruel, conservative townsfolk, I give this movie two burning wagon wheels!