THE UNDERTAKER AND HIS PALS
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| Unrated
| | Copyright 1966 Eola Pictures
| | Reviewed by Andrew Borntreger on 7 October 2001
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- Harry Glass - Private investigator whose luck with the ladies was uncanny. Perhaps he secreted some sort of pheromone that drives them wild? Or was it the beach house? I'm using past tense since he was blown to bits by a bomb.
- Friday - Hoped to fill the missionary...I mean secretary position that Harry had open. A beautiful person, even on the inside.
- Thursday - Horny, just like her sister Friday, but she talks too darn much.
- Anne Poultry - Harry's secretary and bed mate who made her own clothes from furniture pads. Skewered on an iron fence.
- Sally Lamb, the nosy delivery boy, and Rose - What's for dinner.
- The Undertaker - Evil entrepreneur that has brainstormed a plan to increase his business and remove the overhead involved in operating a cafe. First he stumbles off a roof, then a police detective jabs a letter opener into his brain.
- Spike - Works the counter at the Greasy Spoon eatery, but really needed to pay attention in English class. "Hambur-ger" anyone? Dunked in acid.
- Doc - Studied to be a doctor. His techniques make him unfit to be anyone's physician, except people interested in being euthanized. Run over by a truck.
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Three motorcycles pull up to a lone telephone booth and one of the riders enters. Picking up the phone book, he randomly selects a name by closing his eyes and pointing. We see Sally Lamb painting her nails and it is easy to guess who the gang members are coming to visit. The goofy picture of her sailor boyfriend (on a nearby end table) changes to horror, then disgust, as the attackers break in, stab her to death, then start sawing off the unfortunate girl's legs. So begins our movie.
Exactly what I was thinking: the phone book was still there?
Get used to it, because "The Undertaker and His Pals" is a silly little film. The soundtrack is a mishmash of music that, while possibly appropriate to the scene, fits together just about as well as a train carrying live crabs crashing into a train full of live octopi (I don't know, maybe it could happen in Japan). For example: the women are accompanied by burlesque music.
We watch Sally Lamb's parents being wrung out by the Undertaker, who tends to add a few thousand dollars of miscellaneous expenses to his stated fee, then drop in on Harry Glass. He is doing a marvelous job of putting off Anne's fevered insistence on getting married. Instead of matrimony, he suggests getting a bite to eat at the Greasy Spoon. Good job buddy; saying "I do" is like hitting the snooze on an alarm clock and the next buzzer going off in your ear is "I want to have a baby!"
Fare is scarce at the small restaurant. In fact, ordering anything from the menu is pointless. The only thing available is the Special of the Day and that would be "Leg of Lamb." (Get it?) Spike makes a superb go of being certain the audience understands the victuals' ironic twist. Heck, the only thing he didn't do was grab Harry by the shirt, then start screaming "Her surname was Lamb and we cut off her legs! Leg of Lamb! Get it?" Down Spike, down - we get it for crying out loud.
Miss Poultry commits a fatal faux pas while the meal is prepared, letting her last name slip and insulting Spike. She is attacked and impaled soon after Harry drops her off at home. The new entree at the Greasy Spoon the next day is, of course, breast of chicken. Not that it would have the same texture mind you...
A new woman struts into Harry's life after the less than successful funeral. Friday is a short-term fling, though; she takes a quick lunch break before they "get down to business" and selects the cannibal cafe. Doc hears Friday complaining of hunger pains and decides to operate. Yikes! Chloroform anesthetizes the reluctant patient, then Doc scrubs up in the deep sink and dries off with a filthy rag! She is definitely a goner and patrons will be consuming the failure; I just hope they cooked the meat thoroughly. As fate would have it, they grind her up into hamburger; so she is beef. One hundred and sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit should do the trick.
The Undertaker is mortified (let it pass, I only do that once in a while) when he finds out his partners used the entire girl to make ground beef. You see, the deal is that they carve off parts and he makes a profit from interring the rest. Making another foray that evening to bludgeon Rose to death proves a bad decision. One of the older woman's friends is an intense young lady and she has a handgun! Her pelvic thrusts (hehehehe!) accent the fusillade of bullets; the Undertaker is grazed across the neck and his license plate shot off. Now the police and Harry have a solid lead.
Knowing that their goose is cooked causes the three depraved bikers to turn on each other. Spike gets the short end of the deal and is slowly dipped into a huge container full of acid. Harry finds the creep's skeleton while searching the place, but there is no trace of the other two. He also meets Thursday and they hit it off.
The film's last minutes follow the gang members trying to kill Harry and his newest sweetheart, which they do quite badly. A convenient motor vehicle accident transforms Doc into road mush (well, not really, but it should have been messy). Mr. Undertaker has better luck, he constructs a bomb inside a paint can. Thursday walks out to see what the big boom was all about, sees her beau splattered on the walls, and runs up several flights of stairs to avoid the Undertaker. It was a short building; they just filmed her going up - over and over again. I don't know how many times she ran onto the roof before the editor actually let her get there. |
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| Things I Learned From This Movie: | |
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- A funeral dirge sounds like rebel go-go music when played backwards.
- Women are tough and chewy.
- Talking with your hands is an occupational hazard for people who use sharp objects (scalpels, knives, circular saws, etc.).
- Getting pie in your eyes stings.
- Surgery is not the correct treatment for hunger pains.
- Ground beef is made from fake blondes.
- Meat tenderizing can be accomplished with a length of heavy chain.
- Always gag someone before slowly dunking them in acid.
- Motorcycle helmets are overrated.
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- 6 mins - Just how she wanted people to remember her I'm sure, as a whore with too much makeup on.
- 9 mins - Women! Give them one taste of on-the-job nookie and they think it's a relationship.
- 14 mins - Why, it must be nighttime. The crickets are chirping. Ahem...
- 16 mins - What is wrong with that cat?
- 28 mins - Nice casket and arrangement; I especially like the candle holders.
- 38 mins - Boo!
- 39 mins - RANDOM ACT OF VIOLENCE AGAINST A STATUE!
- 45 mins - Why is that suspicious? Don't most restaurants have a large vat of acid in the kitchen? Oh, an intact human skeleton. That is suspicious.
- 60 mins - Time for Friday to find some other man to latch onto.
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| | Audio clips in wav format | SOUNDS | Starving actors speak out | |
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| File | Dialog |  | undertakerpals1.wav
| Mrs. Lamb: "You're both horrible, to talk about money at a time like this!"
Undertaker: "I earned my money, Mrs. Lamb. That girl of yours had her legs chopped off. How would you like to have to sew plastic legs on a cold corpse? Of course, I could've skipped the legs and given her a junior length coffin. That would have been more economical, wouldn't it?"
| | undertakerpals2.wav
| Harry: "Hey, Spike, what is this?"
Spike: "Lamb."
Harry: "That's not lamb."
Spike: "Taste it again."
| | undertakerpals3.wav
| Undertaker: "Remember, we specifically agreed that I could bury Doc's mistakes!"
| | undertakerpals4.wav
| Spike: "The cops will find your license plate, then they'll find you with a bullet hole! Our goose'll be cooked!"
Doc: "I'll have to operate!"
Undertaker: "Oh no you don't!"
| | Theme Song | Listen to a clip from the soundtrack. | |
| | Click for a larger image | IMAGES | Scenes from the movie | |
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| | Watch a scene | VIDEO | MPEG video files | |
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 | undertakerpals1.mpg
- 2.1m
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This is from the end of the movie. All the characters who were killed come back to life and mug for the camera.
Friday was ground up into hamburger. Get it? GET IT?
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| | Leave a comment | EXTRAS | Buy the movie | |
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