MOVIE REVIEW: THE UNDERTAKER & HIS PALS

The original posters make this look much scarier than it is.

Here is a question for you: What kind of movie do you get when you mix the funeral home jokes of The Loved One, the bikers of The Wild Angels, the blood, gore and cannibalism of Blood Feast, with the campy melodrama of Batman? You get The Undertaker and His Pals.

This movie was promoted as a dark and gruesome horror film from the moment of its release in 1966. Watching it now, it has both lost its shock value and comes across as an attempt to be trendy. With that said, this is definitely one of those "so bad, it's good" movies.

The movie opens with a biker gang invading the home of a beautiful blond named Sally Lamb, who sits around the house in a long sleeved, pull over, sweater and a pair of panties. They murder her. I should point out this upsets her sailor boyfriend's photo. Yes, he is not there, but his photo gets very upset at his sexy girlfriend's death (see photo below).

Next, we see Sally Lamb's funeral, presided over by the bald and creepy Mort the mortician (Ray Dannis). Mort has made up Sally with makeup like a clown and charges her parents extra for a pair of artificial legs he attached, because her legs had been removed by her killers. He also has a sign out front that he gives trading stamps.

From there were meet Harry Glass, a private eye with an attractive secretary name Ann Poultry. He takes her to lunch a greasy spoon called The Greasy Spoon, that is run by the bikers. The special of the day is "Leg of Lamb." The bikers are delighted to find out that Ann's last name is Poultry ("Like chicken"). You can figure out where this is going. The next special of the day is "Breast of chicken" after Ann is impaled on a fence in her yard.

Mort directs Ann's funeral, which is so cheap that Ann is placed in a wooden packing crate. Harry begins to look into whether Ann's death was connected to some other deaths, while trying to find a new secretary.

I'm too cute to be in this stupid movie.

A beautiful woman named Friday (Warrene Ott) applies for the job. She gets the job but makes the mistake of eating at The Greasy Spoon. She winds up in a meat grinder and is sold as "hambur-ger."

My question, being a native Ozarker is that odd spelling on the Greasy Spoon chalk board a tip of the hat to Springfield, Missouri's Route 66 icon Red's Giant Hamburg sign (below). One wonders.

Harry is worried about Friday, but then is surprised when her twin sister, Thursday (also Warrene Ott) shows up. I'll not go into the rest of the film because it would spoil it, other than to say that Mort and Thursday engage in a goofy chase scene. When we see Thursday running away, we hear silent movie chase music. Then we see Mort creeping after her, accompanied by a funeral organ.

I will tell you that the film's end credits are goofy. Everyone makes a sort of curtain call, even those that are dead, while a New Orleans style rock & roll song, called "A Devil Like Me", plays. Sally Lamb rises from her coffin with her legs intact and Mort's bad makeup gone. Ann pops out of her packing crate wearing only a fur coat. Friday is sitting in front of the Greasy Spoon slate, which reads "Hambur-ger Get it" eating a hamburger and winking at the audience.

This is the only film ever directed by Tom Swicegood. Legend has it that the film, originally, contained scenes of actual operations and autopsies, but those were cut out (excuse the pun) by independent movie maker Ted. V. Mikels, who distributed it as a second feature to his horror films. Those edits left this movie with a running time of just over an hour. Still, The Undertaker and His Pals is at number seven on "The Goriest Films Ever Made" in the The Signet Book of Movie List by Jeff Rovin. Of course, this book was written in 1979 and Rovin's description sounds like he may have watched a different film. He says there was a "cleaving in two of a delivery boy's skull." This scene is not as bad as he makes it sound, besides the delivery boy is laughing in the end credits (with a band aid on his head). I'm not saying there is some gore, but nothing compared to what we would see in the 70s and 80s.

If you read many on-line reviews of this film, you realize that the people who hate this movie the most are people who want more gore and less humor in their horror films. They also don't understand that this is, as the saying goes, a product of its times. I mentioned that it is a mish mash of hot movie and TV properties of the day at the beginning of this review.

If you are looking for a fun "bad" horror movie for Halloween. This is a fun choice.     
 






 

TEN GOOD CREEPY, SCARY MOMENTS IN NOT-SO-GREAT MOVIES

Anyone who knows me or has read this blog and the old blog knows that I love horror films. I don't care whether they are great or bad, I enjoy them all. I really enjoy when horror films try so hard to be good and winds up laughable. Mainly because I know if I tried to make a horror film, it would end up being as bad or worse. However, there are moments in many of the most famous bad or campy horror films that makes us step back and say "Wow! That was creepy!" or "YIPE! That was scary!" Never mind the ridiculous concept, incoherent storyline, bad acting, bad special effects, for one brief moment in these films something worked. Sadly, these are the things that are rarely mentioned or get posted on You Tube. People focus on Bunny Brekenridge reading from his script, Linda Day George screaming "Bastard!" over and over, Hal Sherwood as the pedophile/incestuous priest, dogs with large plastic fangs and that nerdy guy screaming "OOOOOHHHHHH MMMYYYYY GGGAAAAAAWWWDDDDD!!!" Let's focus on things that the directors and producers got right. 

1. Liz's decapitated head in the roaster pot in The Ghastly Ones. Steven King once said that The Ghastly Ones was the work of morons with cameras. Actually, it was just one person: Andy Milligan. After seeing rubber mannequin arms, hard boiled eggs as eyes, a green-skinned lawyer with long grey nose hair and a priest, that is a dead ringer for Andy Dick's character in Old School, wearing curtains, we are not expecting such frightening image. Milligan used the "head-on-the-plate" gag in other films, but this one works because of the expression on actress Carol Vogel's face and angle her head is lying in the pot. The "head" actors in the other films looked bored and their heads are straight up, so you can tell they merely had their head stuck through a whole in the table. Vogel looks like she might have been the victim of a violent attack. What also makes this disturbing is Milligan using chocolate syrup for blood. Chocolate syrup was used in black and white films for blood. However, in color it looks like something else. It gives you the impression that either Liz or her killer suffered from explosive diarrhea. 

2. The floating old lady from The House on Haunted Hill. William Castle was known for bringing the audience into the film. The House on Haunted Hill was made to incorporate special tricks in the movie theater, such as skeletons dangling over the audience. That is why parts of this movie do not work to today. Except for the old lady above that comes screaming out of nowhere like a bat out of Hell. Of course, it turns out it was a dummy on roller skates that Vincent Price was using to scare people. It is one of the few of his scare tactics in the film that still works on the home video audience, without the benefit of a skeleton on a pulley. 

3. Corpse-puzzle-woman falls out of a hidden compartment behind a bookcase in Pieces. This 80s slasher film starts off in the 1940's with a little boy being punished by his hysterical mother for putting together an obviously 1970s puzzle of a naked woman. She overreacts and tells him to get a trash bag, so she can burn everything he owns. The boy overreacts and brings an axe to put in his mothers head. Years later, detectives Christopher George and Linda Day-George (real life man and wife) are investigating the dismemberment of college co-eds by someone with a chainsaw. One girl's head is lopped off in broad daylight, one is killed on an elevator (the killer hid his chainsaw under his coat), one is killed the waterbed in the girl's exercise room (???) and a girl wets her pants in the ladies room before being sliced in half. We find out not only who the killer is, but that he is also the little boy all grown up. Before it can get any more Scooby Doo-ish, a detective accidental opens a hidden compartment in the wall and out fall a "puzzle" made from the missing "pieces" of the dead girls. Now, there is one more good scare at the end of the film, but why spoil for everyone. I'll just say guys hate the end of this film.  

4. Tor Johnson rises from the grave in Plan 9 From Outer Space. Lets face it, the many problems with Plan 9 are well known by the world today. However, the scene where Tor Johnson rises from his grave is one of the great creepy moments on film. The spooky lighting, fog and the way Johnson rises up worked.

5. Zombie pops up outside the open window in The Mad Doctor of Blood Island. Filipino director Eddie Romero made several half Filipino, half American horror films in the mid 60s to early 80s. Most are filled with gore, bad acting and bad dubbing. The Mad Doctor of Blood Island features a boring villain, a convoluted plot and an annoying camera zooming effect when a zombie is about to attack. The one scene that gives the viewer a legitimate shock is when Angelique Pettyjohn is awaken by what sounds like an injured person outside her window. She walks over and opens the window. A zombie (above) jumps up out of the bushes. This scene works because there is a quiet build up. Just the soft whimpering and rustle of bushes. 

6. The Killer Shrews chew through the wall. Yes, the giant shrews are dogs and sometimes puppets. They may be puppets here but this scene is effective. Many people who saw this on late night TV as a kid say that the shrews chewing through the wall caused them to have nightmares.

7. The Beast From the Haunted Cave sucks the life out of a victim. Many low budget horror films start off as one thing and end up as horror films. This film started off as a gold heist/crime movie and had the horror aspect added later. The monster looks like a cross between pillow stuffing and silly string. However, when you see the beast suck the life from Natalie leaving her darkened eyes, wide open, and staring at the audience, you'll be sleeping with the light on for the next week.  

8. The mutant escapes from the closet in The Brain That Wouldn't Die. From an illogical premise to a skirt chasing, sleaze factor, accompanied by the sleaziest sounding jazz instrumental ever recorded, this movie was a classic even before MST3K got a hold of it. All through the movie, we are told that there is an "experiment gone wrong" in the closet. Near the end, Jan (Virginia Leith) begins communicating with the "thing" with telepathy. She has it attack the lab assistant and rip his arm off. At the end, Jan commands the monster to break down the door and give her former boyfriend and his creator (Jason Evers) his comeuppance. The monster is both goofy and scary at the same time but his emergence is a shock.

9. The second head appears in The Manster. A cocky American reporter begins splitting into two people while in Japan fooling with geisha girls. First, he gets a hairy hand (You figure it out) and then grows an eye on his shoulder. He starts committing murders. A policeman follows him to his hotel and sees him sprout a head in the dark.

10. Joshua's backseat nightmare from Troll 2. Vegetarian goblins turn people into green plants and eat them. Joshua and his family encounter them on vacation. In one scene, Joshua has a nightmare while riding in the backseat of the car. He dreams his family is under the control of the goblins and are turning him into a plant. Probably, the most effective scene in this whole movie.

There is an old song we sang in church about "looking for the silver lining in the clouds." Some films are so bad that they don't have one. I found one in each of these turkeys, there may be more out there.