 |
 Teenage hotrodders find themselves trying to solve the mystery of a haunted house while having a costume ball in an effort to raise money for their car club. 1959, 65 minutes
Would it be a really lazy gimmick if I tried to be funny by appropriating the overbaked hipster slang the hot rodding kids used in this film and declared it to be "the ginchiest?" Sure, I've always been one to take my crate out and race for pink slips, but these hot chewers were the mostest! Lest, you think I'm exaggerating the lengths this movie went to get inside the head of modern (well, 1959 modern that is) kids who love to make poker runs in their tricked out muscle sleds, the movie finishes with these words on the screen: The Endest Man.
What is it exactly that makes Bonzo and the rest of the Zenith drag racing club the ginchiest? Is it the fact that club leader Dave (I'm assuming his name was Dave - I was busy writing down pick up lines from the film such as the classic "if you weren't jacketed, I'd move in!") appears in one of the scenes with an obvious case of Frisbees under his arm? Is it that Dave is constantly babbling about how the club constitution forbids illegal street racing (is he my dad or something?)? Or could it be that they are the subject of a series of newspaper reports that reporter Tom Hendry is calling "This Restless Breed" which makes them sound like a club for Dobermans with attention deficit disorder?
While all those things are fairly ginchy in their own right, the ginchy clincher is that the Zenith Hot Rodding Club is getting evicted from its clubhouse because of a total lack of bread, man. If you saw their clubhouse, you'd understand why they were having trouble coming up with the funds necessary to maintain it. This isn't some pile of wood made into a lean-to in the alley behind Bonzo's house. They've got a spacious garage as well as a diner attached to it, stocked completely with a gun-toting chef! I think we all know how hungry we get when we're dropping in our straight eight engines and trying to fix the rod angle from running those bad boys backwards. You don't think Pomona is going to win itself do you?
At this point, I was digging on the crisis that these kids were experiencing, anticipating some sort of gigantic benefit show where famous hotrodders like Tommy Ivo would show up and help these kids save their farm, I mean community center, I mean their greasy spoon/garage. And in fact, Tommy Ivo did show up! Since I have no idea who Tommy Ivo is (nicknamed "TV" for reasons unknown) I didn't even know he was in this thing until I checked out the credits after the fact. A fairly ginchy example of me not paying attention to things.
But how could I be expected to keep an eye out for TV Tommy Ivo when I was on the look out for this dang ghost that was supposed to be all up in the grill of these kids whenever they tried to race the dangerous curves that make up the legendary Dragstrip Hollow? As you have no doubt suspected, the movie isn't exactly true to its title. First of all, the only drag racing you get is a couple of dames duking in out in these cement canals in L.A. made famous when the Bionic Woman took on that space probe all those years ago. And Dragstrip Hollow is just a name for Flint Canyon, which is where some old lady has a house that she believes is haunted.
Old lady with a haunted house? Group of wisecracking street rodders in need of cash? Nosy reporter who has taken these kids under wing? Sounds to me like we've got a big costume ball at a haunted house in our future! Probably guest starring America's hottest singing idol, American International's own Jimmie Maddin! And you can bet he'll be doing his rising single, "Tongue Tied"! This definitely isn't shaping up to be two weeks on the slab, toots! No way is this shindig going to turn into a real buffalo!
Some of us used to the more traditional style of storytelling where events logically follow one another are no doubt a bit baffled by how we get from a newspaper reporter covering a group of young hotrodders to an old lady and her haunted house. To say that some of the transitions in this movie from one story line to another are rather abrupt is like saying that TV Tommy Ivo is merely an auto mechanic.
This is one example where the movie felt rushed and with a sixty-five minute running time to squeeze in the hotrodders, reporters, square parents, rival hotrodders, old lady, talking parrot, talking car, haunted house, costume ball, and a guy dressed up as monster that looks like cracked pavement, you may not exactly be wishing it was longer, but more time should have been allotted to connect the dots. I'm thinking that this could have been at least seventy or seventy-five minutes.
After Dave's gal Lois gets herself grounded for two weeks once her dad notices her name emblazoned on the front page of the newspaper as a suspect in a drag race and hit and run accident, one of her dad's richest clients appears to stay with them. The old lady, Anatasia, is the kind of goofy old woman that brings her talking parrot with her and the parrot is one of those movie parrots that can carry on conversations and says stuff like "I don't want no damn cracker." The parrot also is able to do impressions of police sirens, thus evoking unpleasant memories of Michael Winslow in Police Academy. I was hoping this ability would play into the plot, but it didn't anymore than the rival gang of hotrodders did, or even hot rodding did for that matter.
Anatasia whines that Lois' dad hasn't sold her haunted house out in Dragstrip Hollow yet and somehow this turns into the Zenith Hot Rod Club promising to go check it out if they can hold club meetings there. Out at the house, strange things start to occur, the strangest being the movies liberal use of old Abbott & Costello gags such as the floating candle trick and the scene where someone slowly realizes they are touching the monster which causes them to make all sorts of faces and go into "silent scream" mode. To truly appreciate masters like Abbott & Costello you only need to see the same material in the hands of fifties hepcats.
Naturally since there was some evidence of it being haunted, but no one was quite able to figure out exactly what was going on, the next morning everyone decides to hold a costume ball that night! Lots of singing and dancing ensue and this is when Jimmie Maddin shows up and does his hit single nobody but his record company and his agent ever heard of. The costume party is also where one of the hotrodders is going to introduce his newest car, code named Amelia. Hey, it could have been worse. Remember a little car named Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?
Amelia turns out to not be that impressive to look at, sporting a beat up jalopy look, but it did have dry ice fog pouring out of it and could also talk. This is where you get that scene where the talking car and the talking parrot insult one another and you're hoping that whomever this TV Tommy Ivo is, that he's nowhere near this scene. How would you like to explain that acting job out at Riverside?
The talking car also happens to be really smart (though what would be the point of building a talking car if it was retarded?) and when it's asked where the monster's hideout is (yes, some of us are still worried about this house being haunted), the car drives over to the fireplace and pushes a button that should have been obvious to everyone there that reveals a secret room where the monster ran his haunted gags from.
The monster is caught and when he is unmasked it turns out to be this ugly, little bald guy with an astonishingly high pitched voice. Our reporter friend immediately recognizes him from his time of covering the movies for the paper (before assuming the hotrod beat I suppose). This is apparently supposed to be significant to the audience since the reporter mentioned in a throwaway line earlier that he had covered the motion picture industry. So where exactly does the reporter recognize him from in his travels in Hollywood? As the whiny guy in the unimaginative rental costume tells us, he was the cat that played the monster in The She-Creature and Day The World Ended (two real films!) and that he was pissed when he wasn't retained for The Horrors Of The Black Museum. A quick check of the credits shows us that this guy ain't lying! He really did play the monsters in those movies!
To show you that this movie is even less intelligent that the Scooby-Doo style mystery this one turns out to be, one important question is never addressed: Although we get the "disgruntled employee" aspect of your haunting scheme, we have no idea why you are haunting this old lady's house! First of all, it was abandoned, so there would be no one to actually haunt. Second, as far as I could tell no one connected to any of these movies had anything to do with this house! So he may as well have been haunting a Kansas trailer park for all the good he was doing in Anatasia's house.
I think it's only fair to blame the writer for these problems, since he's obviously in love with his own work, managing to work in references to a pair of movies that he wrote and make his work the centerpiece of the villain's motives in this movie. This sort of self-obsession might not have been so bad if the movie's script hadn't been so epileptic with its transitions and mismanaged the meager amount of screen time devoted to it. The first half hour dilly-dallied with long scenes of the kids explaining the hot rodding club to the reporter and hanging out with him at their club while we endured a couple of horrid songs not sung by rising mega-star Jimmie Maddin. Don't even get me started on the dance they had at Lois' house followed by the all-girl slumber party that resulted in her dad never getting to use the bathroom (you know how girls are!).
You don't have to be someone of TV Tommy Ivo's skills though to see that in spite of the fact that none of what happens actually adds up to anything more than a series of sequences designed to include every genre of fifties exploitation movies into an hour long extravaganza, that this film is an unqualified success even if it doesn't live up to the promise of its title (hotrods tying to outrace headless horsemen and stuff). If you've read this far, I know I don't need to even explain why this is something you won't quite forget (or quite comprehend) after a viewing. Besides, it even features a cameo by someone wearing one of the masks used in another classic of the era, Invasion Of The Saucer-Men and anytime the big headed, bug-eyed Saucer-Men crash a party, you damn sure know that it's got to be the ginchiest, man!
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
|
|
