Burly Movies: What You Find in 50 Movie DVD Packs

DEVIL TIMES FIVE (1974)
I didn't expect much from this thing, but you get the whole enchilada with this one and then some. I was actually surprised to find myself riveted. Five psychotic children being transported through what appears to be the Canadian wilderness escape their seriously inept asylum orderlies. The children, including a kid Lief Garrett in bell bottoms, a teenage hottie in a nun outfit, a black "soldier" kid and a couple of other sad sacks go begging on Gene Evans' ski lodge home. Evans has a pile of people visiting, his daughter and her middle-aged stud boyfriend, his handler and his bimbo, and a mental midget in a powerful bod ala Frankenstein. The kids basically go to war on these folks, and what ensues is a plethora of 1970s mayhem.

This is an impressive little flick you'd miss while blinking, but it has guts to it. Actually pissed me off at the end, which means it got to me.

ABSOLUTION (1978)
Richard Burton aka "Swinging D*ck" was reaching his apex as a grimacing, thrashing actor with obvious drinking problems weighing heavy under each piercing blue eye. Here he's a priest running a boy's school in England, and one kid, Burton's favorite student and homoerotic fascination, meets a hippie biker in the woods (played by Billy Connelly and his Scottish accent) and accidentally kills him. The kid then reveals the murder in the Confessional, meaning Burton's priest cannot tell anyone what he knows. From that point on, there's a psychological battle between the kid and the priest, in which everything is not as it appears, and some of it is worse than either imagined.

A strange experience, well done no doubt. Burton's histrionics adds a kind of wretched excess to a story about repressed young people yearning for release.

CREEPER aka RITUALS (1977)
A pack of jaded, wealthy doctor types led by a surly and great Hal Holbrook go on a wilderness hike in a butt-remote area and end up facing off against a shadowy mountain man intent on killing them. Not only that, but the killer is giving the doctors symbolic clues as a way to terrorize them.

This is a great flick, with the proper 1970s' Existentialism and a heady dose of anger behind it, making it just as relevant today as it was then. Or relevant to the four or five people who ever saw this movie. Trust me, it's a strong movie with excellent performances that will leave you feeling exhausted and filthy by the end.

UNSANE aka TENEBRE (1982)
I haven't seen nearly enough Dario Argento movies, that's for sure. Every one of them I have seen is emblazoned in my mind like the Dragon scars on Kwai Chang Caine's arms in every episode of "Kung Fu." UNSANE joins that list, with the great Anthony Franciosa as an American writer of sexy murder thrillers who ends up in Rome for a promotional tour. The second he steps foot off the plane, people begin dying in the same methods as those in his novels. Mostly by straight razor, with the killer gleefully informing Fransciosa's character that more will die and he will know it's his fault. And that's only the beginning of the implements of death on display. About fifty people die onscreen, some twice.

Fantastic movie, with John Saxon prominently involved and a host of bloody murders and Italian boys in uncomfortably-tight jeans and Italian women with wicked evil eyes constantly pulling at your zipper, you cannot escape the allure of this thing. I defy you to even try. Magnetic, unique, and sick as only Italians can get away with.

Burly Movies: HOLLYWOOD MAN (1976), SHERLOCK HOLMES (2009) and THE WOLFMAN (2010)

I'll start with the best and work my way down.

HOLLYWOOD MAN is a story about a, well, Hollywood man who is trying to bankroll his latest exploitation Biker Movie. William Smith plays a man who is married to the sexy dame from EATING RAOUL (1982) and has the crazed Don Stroud for his main stunt man. Smith runs a tight shooting schedule to get the borrowed money back to the Mafia hoods, with percentages of the gross and anything else the mobsters can fleece him for. The Mob proceeds to send a psycho who looks like John Fogerty to ensure the shoot is disrupted and Smith doesn't get his movie made.

What happens is about 90 minutes of some interesting 1970s behind-the-scenes filmmaking, with emphasis on Smith and his old lady, the biker trash who seem way more fleshed out than usual in this type of flick, and a few subordinate relationships that are destroyed during the making of the movie. The main thing is Smith refusing to knuckle under while still "begging" for more money from the Mob, essentially cornering himself and his antagonist from Creedence Clearwater Revival. Though Smith nary pops a single bicep through most of the movie, by the last fifteen minutes, the William Smith "I'm Going to Kick the Living Sh*t Out of You" Face is broken out, mayhem happens. And then, a gut-punch ending out of nowhere, until you remember who Smith was dealing with the whole time. HOLLYWOOD MAN is worth seeking out.

SHERLOCK HOLMES is a pretty decent movie. A "fun" flick, mostly, though kind of pointless too. Downey Jr. is fantastic as always. Rachel McAdams is so godd*mn cute and bite-able that I can barely stand it. There's nothing inherently wrong with HOLMES, but it isn't memorable. It's like something that was made so the studio could retain rights to movie Sherlock Holmes, perhaps.

THE WOLFMAN is another case in point. You have to know how much I want a Wolf Man movie to work. The Wolf Man is my favorite Universal Horror icon, barely beating out Frankenstein's Monster. While watching this update of the 1941 classic THE WOLF MAN, I kept thinking about AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, mostly because the Hall of Fame make-up artist Rick Baker is involved in the update, and somewhat because I'm not sure why the movie is a "period piece." The problem is that every cliche you can think of is so hoary as to be infectious. Ignorant villagers, muttonchop Inspectors, cobwebs and the British Moors. YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN glorified and ruined forever all those things. AMERICAN WEREWOLF was a fresh, upbeat, and human story about a dude who becomes a wolf when the moon shines bright. But THE WOLFMAN here is a drab, depressing, morbid tale in which no one, not a single personage in the movie, actually acts human. Unless Victorians were the saddest, sweatiest, dumbest people who ever walked, which this movie makes them out to be, I just don't see the point. I guess the moviemakers were shooting for something Serious, but instead they made a fable about how a computer-generated city cannot sustain human life or supernatural terror.

And even then, realizing this boredom, I could see some interesting stuff going on. In fact, I'm pleased to say the actual Wolfman himself is fantastic-looking, harkening to Jack Pierce's original make-up lovingly. And Baker's transformation, enhanced by the ever-present CGI, especially in the intial turn, is amazingly well-done. The Wolfman's first reign of terror is great. Someone complained about the Wolfman running on all fours. I thought it was excellently-done. Didn't faze me a bit.

What does faze me is the movie just after Larry Talbot becomes human again. It's like someone turned up the Retardo Meter and stood back to let it tilt every subsequent scene of this flick. What started off as a fairly-decent update quickly turns into a giant piece of poorly-written sh*t, culminating in "reveal" of a major character's eeeevil nature and a fight scene between two Wolf Men, which is good, but ending with a violent death that makes no sense. You'll enjoy it if you forget, as the filmmakers did, that a Wolf Man can only be destroyed by silver. For all intents and purposes, a f*cking Wolf Man is indestructible except by silver. That's what the f*cking Gypsy curse is all about. It's why becoming a Wolf Man is so tragic. You can only die by silver, and your soul can only be freed if that silver weapon is wielded by someone who loves you.

Of course, in this movie, all these poor English subjects seem to have silver coming out of their ears. They're able to have munitions of silver practically. How prevalent was silver to a bunch of villagers? That was kind of hard to swallow. I'd have bought the idea if you have a wealthy man in the town who offers up his silver cutlery to be smelted into silver bullets. But this plethora of silver bullets seems like a ham-handed way to tell the audience that Larry Talbot is Up Sh*t Creek. And you'd better start feeling the burn of sadness for his tragic plight.

Strangely, I think humor, not slapstick mind, but the humor found in human fallicy, might have helped this flick as it undoubtedly helped AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON. And weirdly, the only humor to be found in the movie is in the "Extended Scenes" showing the Wolfman crashing a costume party in a huge manse and coming face to face with a blind opera singer. It's actually a scene of character development for the character whom the f*cking movie is named for. Meaning, the Wolfman himself. There was opportunities to see the Wolfman as more than a savage, gut-spilling killing machine. A chance, mind you, to create an icon out of this character, that teens and children even would remember all their lives. Because half the fun of watching horror movies is being a kid sneaking a horror movie you know you aren't supposed to see. Being scared witless but never forgetting the experience and carrying it with you always.

The Wolf Man from 1941 had that power, that supernatural mojo, which kept the character alive for over sixty years. But no one will remember The Wolfman of 2010. And that's the shame of it.