…since I’ve “blogged,” and said entry wasn’t even a real entry, just me kvetching about Moe Hailstone, the 2024 version. Hell, I wish he were a version of Moe Hailstone–at least it would be funny rather than tragic to see people wearing gold diapers with t-shirts proclaiming “Real Men Wear Diapers.” That makes me wonder what Moe Howard would think of that–if he wasn’t keen on Nixon or Reagan, what could he think of the current GOP candidate?
But my point in blogging again wasn’t to write about what the 2024 version of You Nazty Spy! would be (though, whom would play Goering…I can see what’s his face as Goebbels…that one dude that’s virulently anti-Semetic even though he’s Jewish? Y’all know of whom I speak…Stephen Miller!)
Anyhoo…my point (and I DO have one!) is that once again, I plan to have a Six Degrees of Stoogeration Summertime Sh!tty Movie Playlist to kick off the unofficial start of summer, but of course, I’ve been distracted by much better blogs (see: https://acidemic.blogspot.com/) and of course, I’m again tempted to crib a better writing style until I find my own. (Pretty sure I’ve been on this blog for almost 10 years and I haven’t found my own voice quite yet! The fact that I’m not even going to go back and check to even SEE if it’s 10 years is rather telling…)
As I was perusing all the other websites trying to come up with something for the next review (i.e. “borrowing ideas from more talented people than I”), I couldn’t help but notice that I need to come up with a REASON to write. If left to my own devices, I would be the Whitman’s Sampler of Bad Movie Blogs…wait, the Russell Stover of Bad Movie Blogs…uh, the whatever’s the best of that type of cheapo chocolate candy sampler thing desperate folks give significant others for V Day.
What with all the AI goodies they have nowadays, you’d think that I could whip out something in the style of (insert best blogs here…I’ve GOT to learn how to put a blog roll somewhere in here…do they still call them that? I’ve been old since 2005–an uber serious bout of heart failure/pneumonia will do that to you. I should’ve kept my Xanga Journal Chronicles of THAT whole mishegas!)
I should’ve known something was wrong–I wanted to wait until my 30th birthday…THEN I wanted to wait until my parents celebrated their anniversary on 7 December (yep…the anniversary of Pearl Harbor as well!) So, I waited until 8 December…but there was a goddamned snow and ice storm! Being the epitome of cheap, I claimed to my mother that I was going to WALK to the goddamned bus stop (icy roads/sidewalks/and downhill almost all the way!) Why pay $15 for a cab ride when I could pay $0 by using my college/staff pass? WIN-WIN!!!!
Of course, my mother merely chalked this up to the fact that I hadn’t had a good night’s sleep since Thanksgiving; hadn’t eaten more than 800 calories per day since Satan knows when…and I was beginning to hallucinate. These weren’t those hallucinations where you think you see something in the corner of your eye…these were the type where you’d be having an extended conversation asking Larry Fine what it was like to pal around with Clint Eastwood, Edward G. Robinson, Phyllis Diller, Redd Foxx, Edy Williams (and also was Harry Cohn as big a putz as everyone said he was, and how he [Larry] felt about Moe’s son in law, Norman Maurer thinking he was the best actor and funniest comedian of all the Stooges…mind you, he was son in law to Moe and nephew in law to Shemp and Curly!)
It was around this time (with plenty of recovery time on my hands, when I started on my blogging of terrible movies. I came by this via my parents–the late 1970s and early 80s was a world where you had to watch SOMETHING after Wrestling at the Chase (we’ll forget what came on before that…Jerry Damn Falwell), boring talk shows, church crap on radio, OR, whatever terrible movies they were playing on KPLR-TV (Channel 11). But this was thirty years later, so I had South Park to help me along. Did I start my video collection of “Laughter is the Best Medicine” at this time, supplementing my aging Three Stooges videos that were peppered with commercials for The Waterbed Store (it looks like we see the end screen of a Shemp or Joe era short…and this was when it was still on those same reels from 1958), Becky (Queen of Carpet) and Wanda (Princess of Tile) along with a special surprise guest, one Mr. Steve Mizerany! Fantasy Jim Coachworks (whose commercials probably featured at least ONE someone I was familiar with); and later in the 90s, terrible, poorly acted, and out and out scams of “hot girls” you could talk to by calling “1-900-GIRL! Pick up the phone! Pick up the phone!” (This is a reasonable facsimilie thereof…)
That was a VERY convoluted way to tell you that 1: I need to find “new” terrible movies to review and 2: I need to figure out how to do a damn blogroll (or whatever they call that on WordPress.) This is also a convoluted way to tell you that sometimes I prefer watching/reading OTHER people review movies than do the “dirty work” myself. I mean, come on–that’s how I get my material for the few movies I do write about. How else would I have written about Savage Intruder (which has a degree of Stoogeration–Joe Besser as the tour bus driver).
Yes, this was a long-winded diatribe about my attempt to do a March Mayhem and Madness Blogathon where each and every obscure film will either be from the 1970s and have at least one degree of Stoogeration, or will be just a terrible junky exploitationer…with a degree of Stoogeration. I’ve got a little over two weeks to get some ideas together, so let’s hope I come up with something or other…
Today is the day I consider to be the end of the Three Stooges, and here’s why:
In He Stooged to Conquer (aka Moe Howard and the Three Stooges), Moe stated that he was not ready to retire on that fateful day in January—to be fair, they were right in the middle of a film. What was interesting about this was that Howard himself stated in 1965 that the Stooges probably had about five more years in them, then they’d retire. Did he just say as a sort of a flip answer to a question he’d probably been asked since the 1950s, or did he really think that their time was nearing an end? Compare that with another quote of his, “Forever’s a long time, but with a little luck, we just might make it.”
I saw it as a little of both—considering they’d all been performing since they were LITERALLY CHILDREN, it was in their blood to keep on going. Sure, traveling took a toll during the early days, but by the late 1960s, they could jet around the world on PanAm or (a sponsor for the infamous Kook’s Tour) TWA…and speaking of Kook’s Tour, the whole idea of the show (it was supposed to be a TV show that they first made plans for in 1965). However, by 1970, the plans for round-the-world travel to exotic locations had been scaled down to…fishing, boating, and general retirement activities.
I’ve mentioned the home movie aspect of the film before—it definitely looks and feels like a home movie (but not the kind you’d wish someone would shut off). It’s just a bit…off. I haven’t seen it in at least 15 years (I bought it on VHS, so it’s probably longer than that), but I do remember liking it and being a bit surprised at how spry Larry (of all people) was—he even delivered a couple of pratfalls chasing Moose (director Norman Maurer’s Lab). I also couldn’t help but be surprised at how TINY all of them were—when they met fans, you noticed that they were maybe five and a half feet tall…if they had lifts in their shoes.
Now, where was I? Something something the future of the New New New New Three Stooges. If the twin tower of the team is no longer there, what do you do? At this point, do you really want to audition comedians? If you did, who was going to be a good fit? They had to be the right age (at least in their mid-to-late fifties), no more than five feet six inches tall, and willing to do slapstick. By 1970, there weren’t many (if any) comedians that were going to put up with that, especially since you didn’t know how long you’d have the job before Moe and Curly-Joe wanted to retire.
But there was one comedian that would fit those shoes (except being five foot six—he was probably closer to five seven)…one Emil Sitka, longtime foil to the Stooges since their days at Columbia (one of the only two men that worked with all three sets of Stooges—the other was Harold Brauer). Sitka could be brought in with very little (if any) rehearsal and since he was already known from his work with the Stooges, it would be rather easy to change his name (he was going to be “Harry,” Larry’s cousin.)
Now, the problem was finding a project that was worthy of the New New New New New New Three Stooges. There was a movie written by one of Moe’s grandsons entitled Make Mine Manila which would have taken the fellows over to the land of Marcos…the Philippines (ask the Zombies about the joys of touring in the Philippines and being “guests” that had to escape with suitcases full of money). Whether or not Moe had even heard of the Zombies’ adventures is unknown, but he definitely didn’t want to go there—but he also didn’t want to say that not only was the project was a bad idea, he also didn’t like the script. It was discussing among the three of them and Emil decided to be the “bad guy” and nix the idea. According to The Three Stooges Scrapbook, everyone was shocked at his “star turn,” wanting a limo and maybe not even being available.
And this is where things take a strange turn. According to Joan Howard Maurer, she knew why Emil said what he said and agreed with him. However, Jeff and Greg Lenburg (the other authors of Scrapbook) took that story and ran with it…as if it were true. While Joan wanted the truth told about why they turned down the film, she was overruled, and I’m fairly certain that Sitka never really forgave her for that. Interestingly, I was told a similar version of the story by some older gentleman that hung out at Waldenbooks back in the day (hey, it was 1982 and while my parents shopped next door at JC Penney, I made my home at the bookstore…it was a different time!) He may have worked at KPLR-TV back in the day, or maybe one of the radio stations—he knew the Stooges well enough to regale me with stories that weren’t outrageous enough to be lies, but weren’t boring enough to be from a book or something that had been learned third or fourth hand.
Make Mine Manila was supposed to get off the ground in 1971, but crashed and burned before it even started. However, this lack of work made me wonder—were there dates that they were contractually unable to fulfill after Larry’s stroke, and if so, where were they? I always said that if I’d won the lottery, that would be one of the things I’d research—what did the Stooges do between 1970 and 1975? I find it hard to believe that ALL their dates dried up in January 1970, but for such a recent era, there certainly doesn’t seem to be much information out there…if there are any superfans out there that can lead me in the right direction, please do! I’ve scanned Los Angeles and Boston newspapers from 1969-1976—Moe mentioned in He Stooged to Conquer/Moe Howard and the Three Stooges that the New (to the 5th power) Stooges DeRita, Garner and Mitchell) had opened in Boston “but would’ve made better seltzer because they fizzled just as fast.” Compare that to DeRita’s version: “We did okay. We were even getting a few solid laughs.”
One thing I found odd, even in 1982 when I first read Moe Howard and the Three Stooges, was the fact that even I knew some of the dates were off. I knew that Kook’s Tour had barely limped into 1970, much less the relatively late date of 1971 (it was rather exciting that there was an “unknown” Stooge film out there from the recent past!) I wonder how I would’ve reacted if I’d have seen it in 1982 rather than 1999 or 2000—the fact that it wouldn’t have seemed as dated would’ve been a plus, but then again, the infamous Jet Set/Blazing Stewardesses mishegas looked more dated and that was from 1975!
I find it rather fitting that the Stooges couldn’t find a fitting project without Larry—yes, the DeRita/Garner/Miller version of the Stooges existed, and yes, the Howard/DeRita/Sitka version tried to get off the ground in April 1975, but none of them worked in the long run. Okay, The Jet Set didn’t work because Moe was dying of cancer, but they were rehearsing and ready to go. Stika recalled having his bags packed and was ready to go to the location, but received a call that Moe was too ill to continue. (The completed film, Blazing Stewardesses, was completed by TWO of the THREE Ritz Brothers!)
And that was how it ended—Larry died on 24 January 1975, and Moe died some three months later on 4 May 1975.
I’ve always loved working in education–granted, the pay leaves a lot to be desired (unless you’re an administrator–a fact that my piano teachers told me over and over again. “Be an administrator, sit on your ass and let the money roll in!” Seeing that neither of them ever wanted to be administrators, and they knew damn well I wouldn’t be a good one, I guess they were joking.) If you think I’m going to go back and try to diagram that sentence,..
My point? This is the long, boring sludge towards the holiday break–two weeks where I am now, one week when I was in high school, two weeks before that. I don’t get why they decided one week was good enough since they never closed the damn school down for inclement weather. Ice on the roads? School. A foot and a half of snow (LITERALLY)? School. Dumbasses try to commit arson Sunday night and the school smells like smoke? School. No air conditioning? Of course there’s school, because only three damn schools in the whole area had AC! (If the school was built after 1975, AC…and there were only three schools built after 1975 in our area.)
I didn’t mind it TOO much, but when it got really cold and the bus (we had three sad, old-ass buses) didn’t come and you couldn’t safely walk to school (our town is notoriously famous for no sidewalks), you either took your chances or trudged back home from the bus stop. And if your mother called the school about the absence? UNEXCUSED, because school’s ALWAYS OPEN!
There was one year that I braved the ice/snow and walked my dumb self to school…only to be met by a grand total of 5 teachers and 30 students (out of 350 or so). Needless to say, we watched a few movies that day–including Three Stooges shorts, so hey, win all around…until I had to walk back home!
If you’re thinking I had a point to this entry–I did, but I need more time to flush it out. Safe to say it’s not about how boring the period between Thanksgiving and Chanuchristmakwanzaa is! (Think holiday themed bad movie marathons!)
This is a movie I’ve been meaning to watch for a LOOOONG time, especially since the criminally undervalued Matt Cimber is in the director’s chair. ICYMI, Cimber was Jayne Mansfield’s last husband AND had a hand in GLOW (Glorious Ladies of Wrestling…and yes, I know that off the top of my head!)
Anyhoo, here’s the link to the Stooges:
Matt Cimber was married to Jayne Mansfield.
Jayne Mansfield starred in Kiss Them For Me (1957), which also featured Richard Deacon who starred in The Dick Van Dyke Show.
The Dick Van Dyke Show also starred Morey Amsterdam and Carl Reiner.
Amsterdam directed and starred in an oddball “how many of my friends can I get to be in my movie” movie called Don’t Worry, We’ll Think of a Title (1966).
Guess who played Mr. Raines in said movie?
Moe Howard.
Why’d I mention Carl Reiner? Because he was in a short called The Star Spangled Salesman (1968), which also featured the Stooges (Howard, Fine, and DeRita) and was directed by Moe’s son-in-law, Norman Maurer.
And that is how I can tie the Stooges to Jayne Mansfield!
Welcome to one of my laziest posts of the season…which is fitting because this is one of the laziest subjects/videos I’ve seen in a WHILE (and I’ve been watching AI-created videos that sound everything out phonetically!) How is it lazy? Let me count the ways…
W(hy)TF is everything in the public domain? If everything isn’t, I’m lazy, so I’m not gonna look.
How are the Three Stooges on this list for a movie directed by EDWARD BERNDS?!?!? Pretty sure that film should be by one David Lowell Rich (Have Rocket, Will Travel). But to be fair, none of their movies should make it to this list. I’m not saying this as an uberfan, I’m saying this as a fan of olde-tymey slapstick teams. I wouldn’t place Utopia (Laurel and Hardy) here either (The Big Noise? Nope, not even that!)
Give me information that I DON’T know, not something you probably got from Kenneth Anger or his non-union Mexican equivalent.
Does the word “worst” even count anymore? Why is it “the worst?” Bad acting, boring, what? I can’t even think about a $3 budgeted movie as “worst” when there are movies that cost 500 times that much that stink to high heaven.
The more time I think about the term “worst,” the more annoyed I become–maybe it’s because of the Medveds and their “Ed Wood’s the worst director EVAR!” trope–if anything, Wood could be a bit BORING. When I think “bad,” I want hilariously bad (see any of Rudy Ray Moore’s films…except Vampire Assassin).
Anyhoo–this is a lazy post for a lazy video. Enjoy!
I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned the story about the time a high school chum and I thought we were gonna take a road trip (ala whatever terrible road trip movie that was playing on/near June 2, 1993) to see the (second to last) Stooge at the Motion Picture Home…how she got that info, I will never know, but since it was the early 90s, she probably just called Information (seriously, I’ve forgotten how I used to find information…I vaguely recall going to the Central Library in St. Louis and getting a lot of info on where to find folks there…but come to think of it, how weird was that? “Hello, I’m trying to find a contact address for a Joe DeRita…how might I go about doing that?”
Then again, even though that was (probably) the tail end of strangers just popping in places to visit celebrities that allowed that sort of thing, we could STILL PROBABLY HAVE GOTTEN IN THE PLACE. Even though I could swear that it wasn’t made public–how’d shefind out that he was even there? Was there some sort of secret network of uberfans that found out where their favorite former vaudeville comedians were now? (We also wanted to swing by to see Emil Sitka–we definitely knew he was alive and kicking and open to greeting fans.)
Anyhoo, to make a long, boring, probably repeated blog post shorter, both sets of parents said a very loud “HELL NO!” and that was that. (Seriously, though…what the hell did we THINK they were going to say? Two 17-year-old girls driving a damn hoopty [she owned a Pacer…] driving from St. Louis to Los Angeles…yep, NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT in a world where cell phones were still called pay phones.)
At least hers was this color–a couple of kids had light green or light blue ones!
Our grand plans thwarted, the rest of the summer was spent watching the news of the “Great Flood of ’93” and watching craptacular movies on tape and late night TV. The last time I saw my comrade in Stooge, it was at a housewarming/birthday party in 2004…wonder where she is now?
“Flesh Feast” is a horror film released in 1970, directed by Brad F. Grinter and starring Veronica Lake. Set in the world of secret experiments and dark science, the movie follows a deranged scientist who is determined to resurrect Adolf Hitler and his Third Reich using a bizarre method involving maggots. You haven’t lived until you hear the whisky and smoky tinged voice of Miss Lake say “Don’t you like my little maggots?” (Then begins laughing hysterically…but to be fair, there’s a bad imitation Hitler covered with craptacular makeup, white rice, and worms [not maggots]).
The fact that the film is low budget is no surprise–you can tell as soon as the title screen and music start blasting. For the Bad Movie Fan, this can only mean something good is coming and once you see BRAD “I’M A CHAINSMOKING NUDIST THAT ALSO MADE AN X-RATED CHRISTIAN FILM ABOUT A GODDAMN WERETURKEY!!!!!” GRINTER you know you’re in good-bad hands. To say that the film is dated is like saying the sun is hot or that I can’t link this film to the Three Stooges (y’all think I forgot about that? It’s coming.) The release date says 1970 (one of my favorite years for “if it’s the last film I’m gonna do) movies, but it was filmed in 1967 and sat on the shelf for a few years. If it had stayed on the shelf any longer, the gulf between the late 1960s and 1970s would’ve been even more glaring. According to the good folks of “Good Bad or Bad Bad” it seems that some foreign films were behind the times–the films they mentioned were usually Filipino films from the 1980s that looked (and sounded) like they came from 1976. Flesh Feast isn’t that bad–the fashions of the late 60s would work until say, 1974. After that, the ties, the sideburns, the women’s fashions, etc. would’ve been too hard to ignore (and for the bad movie fan, this would’ve just added to the fun!)
While the plot is intriguing, “Flesh Feast” falls short in terms of pacing and character development. The narrative tends to meander, with some scenes feeling unnecessary or out of place, because you’ve gotta get to that magic 80+ minutes to fill out that triple bill at the drive-in! It’s a b-movie, so it’s definitely going to drag a bit, but “bad movie” folks will just breeze over all that.
Looking at the makeup effects gives rise to the question “What could Rick Baker do with this?” Would we get something similar or would we get a slightly better “The Incredible Melting Man?” The makeup and practical effects in “Flesh Feast” are impressive given the limited resources, and the scenes involving maggots are genuinely disturbing…if you’ve never seen maggots before. However, the make-up team deserves credit for their attention in creating an unsettling atmosphere.
This is where I may differ from many of the more snarky reviewers–I don’t think Dame Judi Dench could do more with this material than Miss Lake. Her performance as the brilliant but disturbed scientist is a highlight of the film–she brings a bit of the Shatnerian/Savalas (yes, I’m comparing Veronica Lake to William Shatner and Telly Savalas, but stay with me here), but doesn’t overdo it–it’s like she’s playing Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit and brings the correct shading for the pedalling and the crescendos (Hey, gotta put that music performance degree to use!) She brings a creepy intensity to her character, making her both captivating and unsettling to watch. For those of you that thought she was just a pretty face and a head of glorious hair, you should’ve known better from watching her previous films–this is NOT the usual swan song (Skidoo, Blazing Stewardesses, Whatever That Last Movie Steven Seagal was in), it’s actually worth watching.
Ultimately, “Flesh Feast” is a flawed but intriguing horror film from the 1970s. It may not be for everyone, but fans of cult cinema and vintage horror will find something to appreciate in its eerie atmosphere and unconventional storyline.
Rating: 6/5 Stooges.
Now, how can I link this to the Three Stooges? Welp…Veronica Lake’s first movie was This Gun For Hire, co-starring Alan Ladd. Want to know who the ALMOST lead was? According to his interview in The Star Trek Interview Book, it was one DeForest Kelley. Now, what actors also starred on that show? One William Shatner, who was in a little 1964 pilot called Alexander, which co-starred one Adam “Batman” West. Now, what links West to the Stooges? Lemme tell you about a little film with a slight ungrammatical title…
As I have mentioned many times before, I recall hearing the news that Joe DeRita had died during a commercial break (while watching the Stooges, ironically enough)! I still don’t get the hate folks aim his way–I imagine I wouldn’t feel that great knowing that I was going to be renamed Curly-Joe; but I don’t think he “hated” the Stooges, he just didn’t like their style of comedy–and I can agree to disagree with him about it. Remember, this was a man who had had a career waaaay before he became a Stooge, so it was not like they got Joe Blow from Kokomo to be the Third Stooge. He had a name (in burlesque, no less), and being a “replacement” just because you were short, and fat (like the most popular stooge) would kinda suck. What did not suck, however, was the fact that Larry wanted him as a FULL partner, not just an “employee,” meaning he would get the same salary, the same benefits, the same everything. Now, whoever was the person who wanted him first (the story goes Larry saw him in Vegas and called him a “combination of Curly, Lou Costello, and the fat lady in the opera.”) However, in Moe’s autobiography, he had wanted him even after Shemp died (and wanted to buy out his contract with Minsky–look that one up, kids!) but of course, Columbia wanted whomever they still had under contract (even though they DID have DeRita under contract…once upon a time.)
Things were going like gangbusters until the late 1960s, with the kids from the 1950s growing into teens who probably wanted to go on to someone hipper… (uh, Tiny Tim?) their popularity was waning, and they decided to semi-retire, but not without their infamous swan song, Kook’s Tour. Now, when Tour was first thought of, it was 1965 and it was supposed to be a world tour by a trio of kooks. In 1970, ain’t nobody got time for gallivanting around the world and whatnot. Instead, they chose to stay closer to home…and go fishing… (insert some fans’ yawning sfx here).
What I’m NOT going to do is go into all the reasons why Kook’s Tour is supposedly the worst (or best) thing since sliced bread, but I will tell you that if another film they were set to do had been their actual swan song, I don’t even know how to describe all the feelings I’d have about it. Let me put it this way: if you are a fan of “so bad it’s good” films, then you know who Al Adamson and Sam Sherman are. As the story goes, Sherman and Adamson wanted to make a western spoof with olde-timey comedians they were fans of…and of course, the first team that came to mind was the Three Stooges. But there was a problem…by late 1974, there were only two Stooges, Moe and Curly-Joe. By the time rehearsals began in March, Larry had already been dead for over a month. So, what to do for the necessary Second Stooge?
Have no fear, Emil Sitka is here! He had been in Stooge films since the Curly era, was one of only two actors that had performed with ALL the different sets of Stooges (the other was “Tiny” Brauer), so there would be no need for lengthy rehearsals. As Sitka himself remembers it, “If Moe were here right now, he’d say we could create a scene right now” (paraphrased).
Proof that the fellows COULD make a scene out of pretty much anything!
Unfortunately, The Jet Set (later called Blazing Stewardesses) was not to be. As the rehearsals progressed, Moe became weaker and weaker due to lung (or stomach) cancer and passed away on 4 May 1975. Apparently, Adamson and Sherman didn’t want the Two Stooges, so guess what they came up with?
The damn TWO Ritz Brothers! What was the difference between having two of one trio or two of another? Hell, if that’s the case, they could’ve dragged out Groucho and Zeppo if we want to have former trios that are now duos.
Okay, granted, there weren’t that many olde-timey comedy teams still around that could work with little rehearsal, hit their marks, and not cause the film to go over budget. So, if you want to see what could’ve been the Stooges’ last film, you can watch it over on the YouTubes,
sixdegreesofstoogeration.wordpress.com 