Hillbillys in a Haunted House

1967 horror comedy country western musical

Rating: 3/20

Plot: The titular hillbillys [sic] have car problems on the way to something called a jamboree and have to stay the night in the titular haunted house. Songs are performed. Spies and a gorilla harsh their mellow.

So in the first shot, they're traveling in Boss Hogg's car with slightly more ornamentation, and they're singing a song about being "on [our] way to Nashville, Tennessee." I should have taken it as a warning, ejected the dvd, and hurled it at a chicken. If you like bland old-timey country and western music, you're in for a treat. There's really about 30 minutes of movie here, and the rest of it consists of musical performances. In fact, the final 20 minutes of the movie is the jamboree, so it's just a series of songs that have nothing to do with the haunted house. You get to hear Ferlin Husky, the guy who plays Woody, sing "Livin' in a Trance," a song which sounds like it was recorded in a cave or something but is at least more awkward than it is terrible. Some random people then show up to tell the hillbillys [sic] that they never come near the house even though they are standing inside the house while saying that, and they perform a couple impromptu songs because the movie's plot wasn't quite ready to get started. They do "The Cat Came Back" which features two gitfiddles, a couple guys just standing around, invisible drums, and a guy hitting a small shovel with a brush before complying with the woman's request for a love song, a song that has her twitching in a way that made me wonder if she was reaching orgasm. That gal--Boots, played by a very fetching Joi Lansing--gets her own random song later during a fantasy dream sequence. "Gowns, Gowns, Beautiful Gowns" might be the most pointless things I've ever seen. Later, a character watches television, and Merle Haggard gets a song. There are probably over 15 songs in this motherfucker! And if you don't like country and western music or don't enjoy laughing at terrible film-making, there's nothing for you to see here. I've seen this on a couple "Worst Movie Ever" lists, and it probably deserves to be in consideration. It's very poorly written. I believe this chunk of dialogue is supposed to be humorous:

Woody: Where are we?
Gas station guy: Sleepy Junction.
Woody: Sleepy Junction.
Boots: Where are we?
Woody: Sleepy Junction.
Boots: Oh.
Jeepers: Hey, Woody, we're in Sleepy Junction.

Jeepers is an actual name of a hillbilly, and he's played by Don Bowman who was the host of some country music countdown show. His only other acting credit is the movie this is apparently a sequel for--The Las Vegas Hillbillys. He plays "Don Bowman" in that though, and not Jeepers. As Jeepers, he gives a performance that manages to still seem like one of the worst performances ever even though the movie is a complete disaster anyway. That first shot with the hillbillys [sic] singing in the car? He isn't singing, merely sitting in the back in what seems to be an illegal way. And he can't even get "just sitting there" right! He looks bored. That's actually the best he gets in this movie, too. Most of the time, he looks like he's got ADD or is some kind of tweaker. He spends most of the movie twitching and squinting, but he does get a moment to shine when he starts yelping about seeing a "weirdwolf" in the closet. Oh, and he does get his own song during the jamboree--"Wrong House Last Night" and it is a thing of beauty, one of those things that has to be heard to be believed. Bowman can't even sit still during a fifteen or so minute scene where he just needs to watch television. That, by the way, is one of those "What the hell?" moments as the country music he's watching is interrupted by the faces of Carradine, Chaney Jr., Rathbone, and Ho--the four bad guys. Why their faces start appearing on the television screen to stare at Jeepers is beyond me. Speaking of those guys. You would probably never expect Lon Chaney Jr. to be any good, and he isn't. Neither is Basil Rathbone, though he's the best of the bunch. John Carradine might be the worst of them all, but somebody named Linda Ho isn't far behind. Her acting consists of reading lines phonetically. I did like this conversation:

Woody: We're entertainers.
Ho: What kind of entertaining do you do?
Woody: I sing and pick a guitar.
Ho: How nice. (With this absolutely disgusted look on her face that I'm not sure was supposed to be there.)

The best performance is by George Barrows as Aniatole the monkey. John Carradine's character really hated that gorilla. It was never actually explained why these spies traveled with a gorilla, but I've never been a spy and don't know much about how these people operate. I guess having a gorilla around would make perfect sense. Anyway, George Barrows is the guy who plays one of my favorite movie monsters of all time--Ro-Man in The Robot Monster. Ro-Man is a gorilla suit from the next down and a deep sea diver's helmet for a head. Barrows has one of those acting careers I love looking at. He acted in 108 titles, and he played 16 gorillas. At least! Some of his roles were just names, and those might be gorillas, too. He also played Monstro in a movie and Slouchy McGoo in the Adventures of Superman television series. And he played "henchman" a lot. Barrows and his suit (I'm going to go ahead and assume he owned his own gorilla suit) are actually the best special effect in the movie. Some wobbling skeletons, bats on strings, and the "weirdwolf" mask are nothing short of embarrassing. There are also some lightning effects in a night sky when the action is clearly taking place in daylight and a couple visible boom mics, but if you have problems with that, you're nitpicking. I almost feel bad criticizing something that I'm sure was made by very nice people for very nice families to sit around and enjoy, but it's one of those works of art where everything just came together so imperfectly to make something so magical and deserves to be seen by connoisseurs of crappy movies, even those who don't like gorillas or country and western music.

Indestructible Man

1956 science fiction B-junk

Rating: 7/20

Plot: A murderer known as The Butcher is executed for his crimes but soon after revived by a scientist and his assistant who start dicking around with his body. Not only is he brought back to life--he's also indestructible! He's ticked and wants revenge on his "friends" who double-crossed him.

This wasn't very good. Lon Chaney Jr., who I have nicknamed "The Man of One-and-a-Half Faces," competently plays a big, mute goon. There are a lot of unnecessary close-ups of his face, including one where he is supposedly dead but has wildly-flickering eyelids. He kind of looks like a Native American Andy Griffith at times. Hokey voice-over narration and almost constant music don't help this one, but it's got some moments--a surprise theramin, a scientist who can't pronounce the word syringe correctly, a gangster's womanly scream before a dummy version of himself is tossed off a roof, another obvious dummy thrown in an alley, attacks with a flame thrower and bazooka that prove the indestructible man's clothing is also somehow indestructible, and an improbably silly ending. This is cheap and choppy, seemingly shot in a fortnight, and beefed up with a ill-fitting and half-assed love story between the police detective and The Butcher's love interest. This story could have easily been told in under thirty minutes, so a lot of the seventy minutes drag. This is campy, but it's not really campy enough to make it worthwhile.

The Wolf Man

1941 monster movie

Rating: 15/20

Plot: The second son of a rich guy, a guy rich enough to own his own telescope, ventures into town to pick up chicks. He buys a cane with a wolf's head in order to impress one, a gal he Peeping Tommed with the use of his daddy's telescope, and she recites poetry about werewolves. Then, they meet another character who recites the same poem about werewolves. Then, a pair of gypsies tell the guy all about werewolves and tell him he's about to be bitten by one. Then, he's surprised when he's bitten by a werewolf and turns into one himself. This ruins his plans to boink the gal he spotted with his daddy's telescope.

Some rich atmosphere, quality writing (despite what I wrote up there), and a monster you can connect with and feel sorry for save this one. The titular monster (is it obvious that I really like using the word titular?) is really pretty goofy looking. He really just looks like a hirsute guy with a terrible haircut who might be getting ready to go to a discotheque or might just stay home for the evening, sipping brandy and smoking his phallic pipe while leering at women through a telescope. And the wolf man really isn't in the movie very much. The back of the dvd box tells me that it took make-up people six hours to make Lon Chaney Jr. look like a wolf man and then three hours to make him look like Lon Chaney Jr. again. I think that was for only a single day (or night) of filming though because the wolf man doesn't do a lot. The great Bela Lugosi, here playing a gypsy wolf man and apparently too lazy to spend time with the make-up people so that he gets to be a wolf man on screen, also isn't in this movie nearly enough. Actually, you could argue that there's not nearly enough movie here. At a zippy seventy minutes, it all seems kind of rushed. I would have liked a little more character development and a lot more scenes of the wolf man raping people or biting chickens' heads off or doing something other than just running around the same few trees over and over again. And less lycanthrophy poetry! I do like some of the ideas the makers of this hint at about the duality of human beings (the werewolf as a metaphor), but just like a lot of the rest of this, it's only hinted at.

Titular.

The Unholy Three

1925 drama

Rating: 15/20

Plot: A ventriloquist, a strong man, and a little person break free from a side show to live a life of crime. They come up with an ingenious plan involving cross-dressing, a giant monkey, and parrots. When a couple things don't go according to plan, the trio struggle to keep things together.

Let's go over this again. There's a cross-dressing ventriloquist, a strong man, and a little person disguised as a baby using parrots to rob people? And there's a giant killer monkey and a puppet? I'm in! This is a very strange film for the mid-20s, not surprising I suppose since it's a Tod Browning production with the always odd-looking Lon Chaney, an actor who didn't exactly avoid bizarre roles. Actually, it's not a great movie, more like an extremely silly one, but there are so many ideas straight from left field, that it's hard not to like the thing. I always enjoy Chaney, and he's good here playing a criminal with too much heart. I could have probably played a ventriloquist in a movie from this time period though. The little person (Harry Earles, playing a character named Tweedledee) is also really good, expertly transitioning from a mean little criminal to a baby and vice versa. There are some funny camera effects used to make the monkey seem gigantic and deadly, really succeeding only in making the monkey appear to change sizes from scene to scene. There's also a really goofy courtroom scene that leads to a completely unbelievable ending. Still, this is a silent oddball that is worth checking out.

The Alligator People

1959 b-movie

Rating: 10/20

Plot: A scientist in the bayou uses alligator hormones to help heal injured men. Paul Webster, injured in a plane crash, is one of those men. While traveling by train with his wife Joyce on their honeymoon, he winds up disembarking to make a phone call and not returning. Joyce later searches for him, only to discover that he has turned into a mutant part-man/part alligator. A man with a hook instead of a hand wants to kill him. She screams a lot.

Typical b-movie sci-fi stuff in that you have to wade through all the story to get to the brilliance of the last ten or so minutes. But there's some entertaining stuff going on here--Lon Chaney Jr.'s crazy drunken Cajun is great, the special effects are ingenious, the alligator wrasslin' scenes are very exciting, and Beverey Garland is easy on the eyes. It seems like this was conceived, written, and shot in about a week and a half, but it's worth seeing. Aside from the climactic moment when the transformation is complete, I especially enjoyed hearing the alligator men talk and watching Lon Chaney Jr.'s character's sharpshooting skills.

Laugh, Clown, Laugh

1928 romantic melodrama


Rating: 16/20


Plot: It's another tale of unrequited circus love! Tito is a clown who finds a crying infant who has apparently been stranded. He "adopts" her and she travels with the troupe. As she matures, she learns to art of the tightrope and becomes part of the act. While looking for a rose to put in her hair, she meets the womanizing Count Ravioli who immediately falls in love with her and kisses her bare foot while she's nursing a barbed-wire-fence wound. It's ok. She's of age (14) and he's got a monocle. Tito also rather inappropriately falls in love with his little Simonetta but knows he can not pursue. Tito and Count Ravioli meet through a psychologist they're both seeing, the former because he can't stop crying and the latter because he can't stop bursting into spontaneous laughter. They become friends and the circus love triangle is complete.


"Laugh, clown. . . laugh even though your heart is breaking." Lon Chaney was much better in this than he was in The Unknown, and this also had much better pacing, more elaborate style, and a more emotionally involving story. I had to take a point off my rating because the movie made me feel uncomfortable. I'd commented to Jen that the love interest of Chaney was "pretty hot" and then discovered that Loretta Young was only fourteen when she acted in this. Of course, it didn't seem to be a problem for the male characters in the movie. The denouement is sort of clumsy here, and I'm not sure about the character's motivation at the end, but this still had a lot of moments that silently hit you in the gut. Melodramatic but smooth. One other note: there's barely a wasted title card in this silent film. The dialogue used is poetic, but so much of the story takes place successfully with pantomime and the camera work.


I'm all blubbery eyed:

The Unknown

1927 drama

Rating: 14/20

Plot: Alonzo the Armless is a gypsy circus performer who, using only his feet, hurls knives at Joan Crawford. A circus love triangle develops as Alonzo and the circus strong man Malabar both fall in love with Joan Crawford. Turns out that Alonzo is faking being armless and is actually hiding from the law after robbing banks or something. Luckily for him, Joan Crawford has a hand-phobia and is uncomfortable with the strong man's attempts to grope her. Alonzo's midget sidekick gives him a golden idea that leads to a harsh discovery and a tragic climax.

This predates Tod Browning's Freaks and sort of covers similar ground. Remove the bizarre armless thing and the love interest's phobia of being touched by male hands and you've got a fairly brown-bag, soap operatic film. Nothing terribly special here unless you want to see Lon Chaney smoke a cigarette with his feet. I'm sure his starring role here is pretty demanding with leg flexibility and the wearing of a corset-type thing to hide his arms from Joan Crawford. Actually, I just looked it up, and Chaney had a stand-in--a guy actually born without arms--who smoked the cigarette and played the guitar with his feet. I generally like movies that take place in circuses or have to do with freaks, but there isn't much character or setting variety here. I think there are only around four sets and five characters, and there's nothing at all going on with the direction to make this stand out from contemporary end-of-the-silent-era stuff.

Here I am, probably thinking that I would give this 10 extra points if it included a scene where Lon Chaney pleasures himself with a foot: