Movies That Suck: The Undertaker and His Pals (1966)

The best way to describe The Undertaker and His Pals is to say that it's a horror-comedy that tries to be both gruesome and funny and, while it does sometimes succeed in the former, it either comes off as corny or just plain weird with its choice of humor. A public domain flick, I had never heard of this until my friend Jeff Burr lent me the Blood Feast Collection, a two-DVD set consisting of five movies (most of which you will see reviewed here this month), although ironically, despite the set's title, none of them were any of Herschell Gordon Lewis' films. And yet, the title is also fitting in that you can tell this movie, which was the last one in that set, is very much trying to be in the same vein as movies like Blood Feast and Two Thousand Maniacs! (even that poster is similar to the ones for Lewis' films), being as tasteless and graphic in its violence as it can be while, unlike Lewis' films, also trying to be intentionally funny about it. The only problem is that it tries so hard to be funny that it constantly falls flat, often leaving you baffled as to what you just saw. In addition, it's sloppily-made, with bad direction and editing choices, and it's structured in a manner where things sometimes just happen. You could say the same about the 1983 gore flick, Pieces, but that movie is just so cheesy without actually trying to be that it's enjoyable, something I can't say about this. The movie is definitely gory enough and the effects are passable, but there are a couple of scenes I found so genuinely unsettling that it diluted the attempts at humor even more. It's only 63 minutes long, thankfully, and yet, I still found myself getting really antsy and wishing it would just end about halfway into it. If you can't keep me entertained for just over an hour, then you've failed, as far as I'm concerned.

Three men dressed in leather jackets and riding motorcycles, their faces obscured by their helmets and goggles, break into the apartment of Sally Lamb, murder her, and then dismember and make off with her legs. What's left of Sally's body ends up at the Shady Rest Funeral Parlor, and while her parents come for visitation, the extremely tactless undertaker, Mr. Mort, hits Mr. Lamb with the bill: $1,250, even though he advertised for $144. It turns out, there was a lot more to his contract than there seemed to be. Elsewhere, private detective Harry Glass takes his assistant, Ann Poultry, who's smitten with him and is frustrated by his constantly ignoring her, to dinner at a very low-rent diner called the Greasy Spoon Cafe. The place is run by two men, Doc and Spike, the former of whom is rumored to have been kicked out of medical school for his bizarre behavior and is still studying the practice. The specialty of the day is leg of "lamb," which happens to be the only thing they have, but when they get it, it's very hard to cut and doesn't smell or taste the way it should. Disgusted, they leave, and Glass takes Ann home, where she's later stalked and killed by the same men who murdered Sally Lamb. The next day, a skull-and-crossbones patch is found at the scene and other evidence suggests that it's the work of a motorcycle gang, but it's not much to go on. While at the scene, Glass is approached by Mort, who convinces him to handle Ann's funeral, but when signing the contract, Glass manages to get around the loophole that allows Mort to charge for more than $144, much to his irritation. Glass later has lunch at the Greasy Spoon, unaware that the place's owners have Ann's corpse hanging in the freezer, part of their hideous plan to drum up business by serving people their various body parts. One nosy deliveryman gets himself killed and added to the menu by Doc, while Glass finds that, because he didn't agree to sign for any "ups and extras," Ann's "coffin" turns out to be a wooden packing crate that's leaking blood. He later gets a new assistant, Friday, but she buys the farm when she makes the mistake of going out to the Greasy Spoon and Doc decides to use her in his amateur medical practice before grounding what's left of her into hamburger. This doesn't sit well with Mort, who's in a deal with them to murder people and get half of their bodies to drum up his own business. The three of them continue their killing spree and they must be stopped before more innocent people end at the funeral parlor and as the diner's daily specials.

This movie is so obscure that there's very little background information to be found about the cast and crew, including the director, T.L.P. Swicegood. I know that an alternate name of his was Tom Swicegood (good thing I found that; with so little to go on, I was unsure of Swicegood's gender), he wrote the story for an episode of The Untouchables, he wrote and also produced a 1963 film called Escape from Hell Island (which has an even lower IMDB rating than this film), and that The Undertaker and His Pals, which he also wrote, was the only movie he ever directed, but that's it. I don't know what became of him afterward, if he's still alive or not, or anything about his background. I had no luck finding an image of him either. In fact, all I found when I typed in both of his names was either a bunch of pornographic images of women or, weirdly enough, images related to a funeral service with Swicegood as one of its names!

The director is not the only unknown quantity of this movie because, of a cast that's made up of 15 actors, IMDB only matches five of them with the parts they played and two of them don't have major roles in the story. So, you're not going to see many actors listed in parentheses next to the character names, as you usually do. One who is listed, though, is the film's ostensible lead, Harry Glass (Rad Fulton, whose name is actually James Westmoreland), a private detective whose secretary/lover, Ann, falls prey to the villains. However, Glass is one of the stiffest, blandest, and ultimately most ineffective leading men I think I've ever seen in a horror movie, old or more recent. The guy has virtually no emotions when he talks and after Ann's murdered, despite claiming that he's upset and would like to kill whoever did it, he has even less reaction to it than you would after you slightly stub your finger. For instance, after his meeting up with Mort, the undertaker, at the crime scene, Glass goes to the Greasy Spoon, which he took Ann to the night before (and left in disgust because of the lousy quality of the "meat"), and when one of the place's server, Spike, says that he and Doc are sorry about what happened, he says, "Yeah, I'd sure like to get my hands on those bums," in the most flat way possible. He sounds the same way when he goes to the Shady Rest Funeral Parlor and says that he's come to pay his last respects to Ann, and while he is offended by Mort's lack of respect enough to punch and smash a vase over his head, Ann seems like a distant memory when he returns to his office and meets his lovely new potential secretary, Friday. He claims that she doesn't have the job, despite her flirting, but he then suggests she go down, have some dinner, and they'll "talk it all over" when she gets back up to his office, going as far as to give her some money. Friday ends up falling prey to the killers as well, but Glass is completely oblivious to this. In fact, he only really gets involved with the plot more than halfway in, when a police detective friend of his, Jennings, asks him if he can find out who Mort is connected to when they find evidence that links him to the crimes. He does find out about Mort's connection to the Greasy Spoon thanks to a guy named "Stool Pigeon Charley" and finally decides to do some investigating by snooping around in the diner's back area, when he finds Spike's acid-dissolved skeleton. That's where he meets Friday's twin sister, Thursday, and while he has an idea of what's happened to Friday, decides to have her spend the night with him, only to fall asleep on the couch while she's flirting with him (he did phone Jennings and tell him about Mort's connection to the Greasy Spoon, about the only useful thing he does do). The next day, while he's driving her home, he stops in the road, saying they're out of gas, and then hops in the next car that comes by and just leaves her there! And he doesn't even take part in the finale. He just leaves Thursday in his office and completely disappears when Mort blows up a floor of his office building, forcing her to fend for herself. If the idea was that he died in the explosion, they didn't make that clear at all.

Ann Poultry (Sally Frei), Harry Glass' first secretary, is frustrated by his often ignoring her advances and his refusal to marry her, even when she "threatens" to throw herself out of his office window when he again turns her down. I put threatens in quotation marks because it was clearly just a half-hearted attempt to get his attention, and his reaction to that is to pick up the phone, feign calling the employment bureau, and ask for a new secretary because his current one is "about ready to leave." Following that, she tells him she hates him but she still allows him to take her to dinner. She ends up wishing he hadn't, though, as they eat at the Greasy Spoon Cafe, which she feels would be best if it were hit by a tornado. She seemed to already about the place and who runs it, talking about Doc and the rumors that he got kicked out of medical school for his weirdness. Spike doesn't win her approval either, first by calling her "baby" and then making fun of her last name by making chicken sounds. The last straw is when both she and Glass order the specials, leg of "lamb," and are so disgusted by it that they walk out, with Ann commenting, "This joint would give Mr. Clean nightmares," adding that she's going to call the health inspectors. That last comment might have sealed her fate, as after Glass takes her home, she goes outside, looking for her cat, Toby, and finds him, as well as the three killers. She's attacked, impaled on one of the fence spires around her yard, and Doc and Spike later serve her as up "chicken breast," while Mort takes care of the funeral arrangements and stuffs what's left of her in a wooden crate when Glass refuses to sign for anything extra in the contract.

Ann's death makes way for Friday (Warrene Ott), a sexy blonde who wanders into Glass' office and all but throws herself at him, laying down on his desk, mentioning that her sister told her he was really handsome, and when he asks her what she can do, she responds, "What do you think?" She's a bit put off when she tells him, "Call me Friday," and he responds, "No, but what's your name?" (ugh, what a corny joke), saying, "My sister didn't tell me you were hard of hearing," as well as when he asks her if she's a kook, but she still decides to go for the job. She doesn't get it right away but he offers to go grab some dinner and come back to his office so they can "talk it all over." Friday doesn't make it back to the office, however. She makes the mistake of going to the Greasy Spoon and commenting that she has a bit of pain from not eating anything. Doc takes this as an opportunity to have her forcibly sedated so he can take her in the back, cut into her midsection, and poke around her innards. Needless to say, she dies from this, and they serve up part of her as hamburger (which is what she wanted when she first walked in), while dissolving the rest of her acid, which annoys Mort as he could have used the business. However, Ott is not completely out of the movie, as she later returns as Friday's twin sister, Thursday, who Glass meets while poking around the Greasy Spoon, explaining that she's looking for her sister and figured he might know where she is. However, she tosses that away immediately in order to flirt with Glass, talking him into taking her home with him after saying that she can't go home because she told her mother she was spending the night with a friend who's out of town. Going home with Glass turns out to be the least romantic thing possible, though, as he falls asleep while she's trying to flirt with him; the next day, while they're driving, they supposedly run out of gas, he inexplicably jumps into a passing car and leaves her alone, where she's chased by Mort and Doc on their motorcycles, which ends in Doc getting killed; and then, at Glass' office, she's chased around by Mort, nearly meets her end a few times, and is again only saved by sheer dumb luck.

The villains are the only characters in the film who leave any kind of impression, chief among them Mort (Ray Dannis), the eponymous undertaker. Not only does this guy have a sick deal with the two who run the Greasy Spoon Diner to drum up business for themselves by killing innocent people but, when it comes to handling his business of funeral arrangements, he's an insensitive asshole who has no sympathy for the mourners' grief. This shouldn't be that much of a surprise, given what a psycho he is, but his level of dickishness is off the scale. When Sally Lamb's parents are trying to pay their final respects, he first compliments his own handiwork of painting her face and then, he takes Mr. Lamb aside to give him the bill, saying that doing so helps takes his mind off his grief. Naturally, Mr. Lamb is not happy when he sees that the bill is for $1,250 and when he becomes angry, Mort says, "See? You've forgotten your grief already." After an argument they have about it, and with the weeping Mrs. Lamb they're both terrible to think about money at such a time, Mort digs the knife in further by telling her, "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 have skipped the legs and given her a junior-length coffin. That would have been economical, wouldn't it? And her throat. If you could have seen her throat!" As the bereaved couple leaves, Mort repeats twice that they'll pay. Can we spell douche? And after Ann's murder, Mort shows up out of nowhere at the crime scene to offer Harry Glass his services, knowing everything about Ann because it's his business to know, and when Glass decides to let him do it, Mort brags about what a great job he does. But, then he gives Glass the contracts. When Glass sees there's no price on them, despite Mort's saying that the cost is $144, and his then explaining that there are a few extras sometimes, he writes in the price himself, guaranteeing that he can't overcharge him. Enraged by this, Glass gets back at him by putting Ann's body in a storage crate, reminding him that he asked for nothing extra and adding, "Our association doesn't approve of low-price funerals, but when the needy need help, I always try to do what I can." This gets him punched to the floor and a vase smashed over his head, and yet, all he can do is comment about Glass' lack of gratitude!

Later, Mort isn't happy when Doc and Spike seem to renege on their deal by dissolving the rest of Friday's body in the acid after they used most of her for hamburger meat, lamenting that it's so hard to run a business without any ups or extras. Desperate since the end of the month is coming, Mort decides they need to pull another job but, while they manage to get away with their victim's body, the license plate on the back of his motorcycle gets shot off during the getaway, which ties him to the killings and, eventually, the Greasy Spoon. At first, Doc and Spike try to kill him for this but, when he manages to turn the tables on Spike, he convinces Doc to join him and they then kill Spike. Now, with it just being him and Doc, the two of them follow Glass and Thursday after they leave the Greasy Spoon and attempt to abduct the girl next day. However, Doc ends up getting killed in the chase, leaving Mort by himself. The crazed undertaker still tries to keep his business going by following Glass and Thursday back to Glass' office, blowing up a floor with a bomb, and then chasing her all the around the building, even surviving a fall off the top of the roof at one point. He finally dies when he's hiding behind some drapes to spring out at Thursday and Jennings accidentally stabs him in the forehead while making a gesture with a letter opener in his hand.

The two guys who run the Greasy Spoon, Spike and Doc, are also as memorable as Mort. Being the server, Spike is the more personable of the two, but not always in a good way, as he makes fun of Ann Poultry's last name and goes on to call her "Chicken" when she objects to it. He often has to tell the customers who come in that the only meat they have is often whatever the day's special happens to be, and there's one instance where, when a man orders some chicken, he looks back in the kitchen, sees that Doc has killed a black deliveryman, and, with a smirk, asks, "Uh, how would you like that order? White meat or dark?" And he acts all horrified about the news of the murders, telling Glass after Ann's murder that he and Doc will help him in finding her killer if he asks. Doc, a former medical student, meanwhile, spends most of his time in the back of the diner, studying surgical procedures when he's not giving Spike his orders. A tad more standoffish than Spike, Doc is always looking for a specimen to practice on and uses Friday's comment that she has a "pain" from having not eaten as an excuse to drug her and carry her in the back. After Spike strips her down to her underwear, Doc decides to just poke around her insides until he finds what's wrong with her. Friday eventually wakes up as he's rummaging through her innards and dies from the shock. They decide to grind some of her up into hamburger meat and dissolve the rest in a barrel of acid they keep back there. That night, they and Mort don their motorcycle gang getup again and kill a woman at a sauna (Doc seemingly taking sadistic pleasure in this act), taking a section of her body with them. But, Mort losing his license plate and endangering them makes Doc and Spike decide they need to get rid of him. Doc attempts to operate on him, while Spike suggests dumping him in the acid, but when Mort manages to gain the upper hand on Spike, Doc turns on him as well, saying he's not that good of a nurse anyway. They kill Spike by slowly lowering him into the acid, all while he screams like a girl, but the next day, while they're chasing Thursday on the road after Glass inexplicably leaves her, Doc gets killed when he runs right into the front of a cargo truck. Yeah, the villains in this movie get their comeuppance due to their own stupidity.

While we're on the subject of the villains, the way they look in their biker gang outfits is fairly memorable in how they're dressed completely in black, with scarfs covering the lower parts of their mouths, goggles over their eyes, and white, motorcycle cop-like helmets on their heads. It fits in with the popular image of bikers that was prevalent at the time. While Mort and Spike are indistinguishable from each other when they're like that, Doc stands out because of the skull and crossbones patch he has on his black leather jacket (he loses that early on) and how his goggles are a see-through tan color, while the other two wear dark goggles. I have a feeling that Doc's goggles are clearer because of the sadistic pleasure he seems to get out of killing and he wants his victims to see just how much he enjoys it.

Rounding out the main cast of characters is Detective Johnny Jennings, Harry Glass' friend in the police department who first appears at the crime scene of Ann's murder. He doesn't have much of a role, aside from asking Glass if he knows anything that could help them in their investigation, such as if Ann had any enemies and later asking him to find Mort's connections when it's discovered he's involved with the killings, and advising him not to take the law into his own hands (as I described earlier, he doesn't have to worry about Glass doing that at all). After Glass learns that Mort associates with the guys who run the Greasy Spoon, and also after he's snooped around the place, he calls Jennings to tell him about it, as well as that all the evidence they'll need is inside the place. Jennings doesn't show up again until the very end, when he appears in Glass' office after Thursday has been chased around the building by Mort and, thinking it's over, makes this long speech: "We don't need any unnecessary violence in this world. Nature makes enough of its own. Still, a certain amount of evil always creeps in, and we must just strike it down." He makes a gesture while holding a letter opener in his hand, stabbing it through some drapes and unknowingly getting Mort right in the forehead as he's waiting to attack Thursday again.

The rest of the notable characters appear in only one scene each and are usually victims of the killers. Sally Lamb (Karen Ciral) is a leggy blonde who's attacked and killed in her apartment at the very beginning of the movie, her legs severed and later used as "leg of lamb" at the Greasy Spoon; her bereaved parents go to the Shady Rest Funeral Parlor in order to pay their last respects, with Mrs. Lamb bawling her eyes out, lamenting that Sally ever left home and came to the city, while her husband argues with Mort over the bill and faints when he goes into graphic detail about how he had to prepare her body; Bob, a black deliveryman, brings some products to the Greasy Spoon and gets too nosy for his own good, wondering why they never buy any meat and, after snooping around, finds Ann's body hanging in the freezer, after which he gets a cleaver to the face; a customer comes into the cafe and, after being put off by Spike telling him that they only have left over leg of lamb and chicken breasts, to the point where he asks if he's on Candid Camera, orders a pie and promptly splats it in Spike's face; and Rose, a woman in a sauna who, after talking about quitting her job and getting married for the fourth time, is attacked and killed in a scene that I actually found kind of unsettling.

More so than Billy the Kid Versus Dracula, this movie absolutely reeks of having virtually no budget to speak of. Even the most high quality-looking prints give off that bottom-of-the-barrel, public domain vibe; the sound is similarly subpar (you can make out what's being said but you can also tell that no ADR was done and they used whatever was recorded during filming, including one exterior scene between Harry Glass and Mort where you can hear an airplane flying over); and the locations and sets, if you can call them that, are all places they likely just found or rented out very cheaply. You can tell that they did a lot of actual location shooting on various street corners, country roads, and rural backyards, specifically in Los Angeles and Glendale, likely without permits and often using very bad day-for-night effects, whereas the few interiors are a bunch of rather small spaces that they used again and again and again in order to save money. In fact, you get the feeling that some of these places were rather barren at first and they dressed them up as best as they could to give the impression that there's more to them than there actually is. For instance, Harry Glass' office is just a bland-looking room with nothing more than a desk at the center of it, some green drapes and curtains lining the walls and windows, one lone chair over to the right, and a stool over by the door. The same goes for the interior of the Shady Rest Funeral Parlor, which is a rather enclosed place with a bunch of curtains, seemingly trying to make it look as if there's more there. The sauna where one of the murders is committed is really odd-looking, with the victim, Rose, looking as if she's lying on a stack of wooden slats, a marble statue behind what I guess are the sauna rocks, and some kind of rope hanging from the ceiling in front of it. Moreover, the outside of that room looks like somebody's house more than it does a public place, with a brick wall beside a papered one that has a table with a lamp in front of it. The one place that looks authentic is the Greasy Spoon, as both the area out front and the kitchen in the back does look like some low-rent, sleazy diner they found and decided to shoot at. The shots of the highways out in the desert and by the seashore do look kind of nice, though.

I can excuse the way this looks and sounds because of how little the people behind it obviously had to work with, but a shoestring budget is no excuse for plain old bad filmmaking and this movie is loaded with it. For example, there are moments where it feels like they didn't cut out any of their B-roll footage, causing them to go on much longer than they should. When Glass drives Ann home after their disastrous decision to eat at the Greasy Spoon, you see them pull up, Glass get out of the car, walk around to the passenger side, let Ann out, walk her to her front door, kiss her goodnight before she goes in, walk back to his car, get in, and drive off. Good thing they cut to a different angle on Ann's front door at one point, otherwise this would have been even more monotonous. I kept waiting for something to happen during this close to a full minute of dead air and when nothing did, I wondered what the point of it was. There's a similar thing with the killers when they're driving around on their motorcycles, as get many long shots of them on the same part of the street near some payphones, where they use the directories in the phone-book to find victims. But the worst offender of this is when Glass takes Thursday home with him after meeting her. After he calls Detective Jennings to tell him of Mort's connection to the Greasy Spoon, we get a sequence of Mort and Doc following Glass and Thursday on their motorcycles that goes on for almost two full minutes. I thought it was longer than that, to be honest, because it's so boring, even the funky music they have playing doesn't liven it up one bit. And, while not as long, the scene where Mort and Doc chase after Thursday on the road the following day isn't as exciting as it sounds. It's just her running back and forth on the same section of road, Mort and Doc coming at her and slashing at her with knives in a manner that's just plain sissy, and it goes on until Doc ends up crashing into the front of a truck that comes around the bend ahead of him.

Going back to the use of day-for-night, it's used about as much as actual nighttime footage, which is not good because it's some of the worst I've ever seen, and I've seen some really bad examples. The difference between the two is absolutely jaw-dropping, which is to say nothing of how jarring the switch between them is, which tends to happen very often. When Glass first takes Ann to the Greasy Spoon, you can tell that was really shot at night but, when he takes her home afterward, it's clearly daytime made to look like night. Moreover, it switches back to real nighttime footage during the scene afterward where Ann wanders outside her house, looking for her cat, and is killed. However, that switch and the transitions between day-for-night to actual night shots here in general are nothing compared to what you get during the long sequence where Glass and Thursday are followed home by Mort and Doc. It goes from the middle of the night when they start following them by the phone-booths to full-blown daytime, with no nighttime filters at all, when they're driving down the roads that go through the countryside (seriously goes from midday lighting to late afternoon sunset), and this is followed by a nighttime shot of the car pulling up to the house and entering the garage, and a final day-for-night shot of the killers by the beach as they drive off somewhere to lie in wait. Except for the first one, the images in this paragraph show the way it changes in sequence, so you'll see that I'm not exaggerating. Even Ed Wood would be dumbfounded at how incompetent this is. Plus, all this and Thursday later comments in shock that it's 3:45 AM, destroying any hope the movie had of my giving it the benefit of the doubt as to how long this sequence is supposed to have gone on. What I don't get is why they had the means to actually shoot some scenes at night but couldn't for others. Again, I know they had a miniscule budget but still, did the rental they had on their lighting equipment expire, so they had to make due with day-for-night? Who knows?

There are a lot of bad editing choices to be found here as well. The most common one is how abruptly the film will cut from one scene to the next, sometimes making it seem like there was more there originally. When Glass completely ignores her advances and her threat to jump out the office window if he refuses to marry her, Ann grumbles, "I hate you, Harry Glass," and then immediately, we cut to the establishing shot of them pulling up to the Greasy Spoon. This also often happens when someone's murdered. Staying with Ann, when she gets hers, we see the killers grab and then pull her off-screen, followed by a long panning shot across the spires of the fence lining the edge of her lawn as we her struggling from just off-camera. It's actually a fairly effective piece, but it's ruined by how, when the camera reveals her impaled on one of the spires, we only get a split-second look at her before a jarring cut, complete with a whirling camera and the sound of police sirens, whisks us away to the next scene, which is the investigation of the crime the next day (the first two images here show you how it plays out). A similarly dizzying example of editing occurs when Doc crashes his motorcycle into the front of that truck. After the shot of him heading for it, we get assaulted by a montage of tumbling close-ups of the motorcycle's tires and the truck's grill and it's only after Mort escapes that we get a close-up of the spinning tire as the motorcycle lies on the road and another of Doc's bloody face before we get a wide-shot of him lying in front of the truck; until then, you're likely to not know what happened. Look at the third image here. You can't tell what that is at all, can you? And going back to Ann, when she goes outside, looking for her cat, Toby, the two of them are never in the same shot, as it cuts from her looking off-camera to a close-up of a cat, which you can tell was filmed at a different time, as we again have another conflict between real nighttime shots and day-for-night. That part baffled me. They really couldn't afford to get a cat in the actual scene? Would it be that expensive?

While we're on the the subject of editing, the film was altered when it was originally released in 1966, as the initial cut made extensive use of footage from surgery training films. But, when this caused it to get banned in certain parts of the country, they removed all but one of those instances, specifically what you see when Doc is "operating" on Friday (I'm not going to show that, as it's disgusting and I might run into trouble). This is why the film, as it is now, is so short, and I also wonder if it may account for those sudden cuts I described up above. I also wonder if there's a similar explanation for why much of the first scene is shot in heavy sepia tone, only to switch to actual color in the middle of Sally Lamb's murder and stay that way for the rest of the film. I don't know if that was a bizarre, artistic choice or if it's a result of bad preservation, due to the movie's public domain status, or what, as it doesn't make sense in context. But, then again, so much about this movie is weird and inexplicable that I wouldn't be surprised if it were done later.

Like H.G. Lewis' films, The Undertaker and His Pals features some pretty grisly killings for a movie made in the mid-60's, more so than even the goriest of the Hammer movies (some of those are pretty violent and bloody but they never quite got this depraved about it). Sally Lamb gets stabbed repeatedly in the front with two butcher knives, which are then shown sticking out of her torso, and her legs are then severed; Ann Poultry gets impaled on the spire of a fence near her yard and there's a brief shot of her legs hanging by the feet on meat-hooks in the Greasy Spoon's freezer (makes me think of that horrific crime scene photo from Ed Gein's house); Bob the deliveryman gets a meat cleaver in his head; Friday gets her stomach cut open and her innards poked around by a scalpel before she bites the dust and is made into hamburger meat while the rest of her is dissolved in acid (offscreen, mind you); Rose, the woman at the sauna, gets beaten in the face with a chain until she's bloody and, judging by the small size of the bag the killers escape with, it looks like they again severed a part of her body; Spike gets slowly lowered into the acid from earlier (though, as I'll talk about, his girly screaming makes it funny) and is reduced to a skeleton that's found later; Doc crashes into the front of a truck; and Mort ends up with a letter opener sticking out of his forehead. The gore effects aren't on the level of what you would later see from the likes of Tom Savini and KNB, as the blood tends to look like ketchup, but for the time period and how unusual it was to see such stuff at that point, it works well enough.

Where it doesn't work well, however, is when it's mixed in with the abundance of comedy. Doing a horror-comedy is a tricky thing, as it's a fine balancing act where you have to make sure not to go too far in either direction and keep both elements in tone with each other; otherwise, one element will dilute the other. Movies like An American Werewolf in London, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, and Peter Jackson's Dead Alive, aka Braindead, are prime examples of movies that are extremely gory and have a rather unsettling vibe to them and yet, at the same time, are very funny without it feeling out of place. The Undertaker and His Pals does have instances of really dark humor that work fine, given the overall nature of the movie, but, as I'll go into detail about, a lot of the humor is downright goofy and weird and it makes it a bit jarring when it tries to go from some really grisly scenes to slapstick gags. It's not helped by the fact that many of the murders consist of innocent women being stalked, attacked, murdered, and chopped up, sometimes in a manner that's a bit unsettling. Though it does a good job in establishing the film's level of graphic violence from the outset, watching Sally Lamb get assaulted, stabbed to death, and have her legs severed is a bit "ugh," but that's nothing compared to Rose's murder in the sauna. As I said earlier, that scene made me a bit uncomfortable, mainly it's the one murder that really lingers on the suffering the victim experiences as she's beaten repeatedly with a chain and the sick enjoyment Doc seems to get out of it, and this after Rose had an innocent conversation about how she's going to try her hand at marriage again. Going from that to more silly stuff is akin to how The Last House on the Left tends to switch from scenes of torture, rape, and brutal murder to comic scenes with those cops. At least this movie is intentionally trying to be a comedy as well as a horror film, so it's not quite that level of mood whiplash, but it's still a problem in my opinion.

The film's biggest issue in my opinion is that, as it continually tries to be funny as well as gruesome, it fails again and again, aside from some occasional instances of humorous dialogue (specifically that of Mort) and a few small chuckle-inducing moments here and there. The movie can't decide on what kind of humor it wants to employ, for one thing. Like I said, it runs the gambit from being quite dark and morbid to typical slapstick and finally to being full on cartoony, but no matter what tone it chooses, it often comes off as either weird, unfunny, or just stupid. The first gag you see is when Sally Lamb is being butchered in the opening, the camera cutting away to a couple of close-ups of this picture of a seaman, whom I'm guessing is a beau of hers. Whoever he is, his image reacts to what's going on: first, he's gasping in horror, and then he has his fingers on the side of his face as Sally is being dismembered. In the next scene, Mort has to switch the tape recorder that plays the gloomy music for the funeral, because when he first turns it on, it's playing this song called, "There's Never Been A Devil Like Me," which I'll talk about more later. When he's talking to Mr. Lamb about the bill for the funeral, he unfurls an absurdly long list of additional costs attached to the contract, as he names off the various aspects that made the balance $1,250. Before the scene where Harry Glass and Ann Poultry are first introduced, you see a shot of notes Ann put on his office door, telling any possible clients to come back later, as she plans to work on him herself. We then get the first scene in the Greasy Spoon Cafe and some of the really dark humor, with the special of the day being "leg of lamb," which we know the double meaning of all too well (it's sick, but it's also corny), and the moment where, after receiving their dishes, Glass, after cutting of a bit of meat and taking a whiff of it, isn't sure that the meal is what they're proclaiming it to be and he and Ann promptly leave.

Where the humor starts to get stupid is during the first meeting between Glass and Mort. Irked at Glass finding a way to get around his contract's loophole of charging for a number of extra services that weren't asked for, Mort turns away from Glass, nearly walks into a police officer behind him, who makes a weird face at him, and then he steps on a skateboard that was randomly sitting there. Glass has a laugh as he watches him bumble his way into the street, going through some kids who are running and skating on the sidewalk, and falling on his butt in the street, as a shirtless kid grabs the skateboard and runs off with it after laughing in his face. This is all set to silly music, complete with a "wa, wa," sound after he's hit the concrete, and it was at this point where I thought, "This is freaking stupid." It doesn't get any better when we go back to the Greasy Spoon, where Doc, as he's reading up on his surgery textbook, ends up cutting himself with a scalpel before he murders Bob, the deliveryman. Spike tends to a customer who comes in and, after his other choices are shot down, asks for the special, which is breast of chicken (try and guess why the special is that), and when Spike sees Bob's body in the back, with the meat cleaver in his head, he makes the crack about wanting white or dark meat. Thinking he's being messed with, the guy instead orders a pie and then puts it in Spike's face, another gag that comes with "wa, wa" music. At this point, my brain was so numb from this that it took me a bit to realize why he did that, to begin with. The gag at the Shady Rest Funeral Parlor, where Mort gets back at Glass for not asking for anything extra in the service by putting Ann's body in a packing crate, is actually kind of funny in how wrong it is, and so is the slapstick where Mort gets punched to the floor and gets a flower vase smashed over his head. Said slapstick is dumb, but I found it funnier than the whole thing with the skateboard.

And then, the movie shoots itself in the foot with more humor that's just dumb, as after that you have the introduction of Friday and that predictable joke involving her name. Following that, is the scene where she goes to the Greasy Spoon and Doc decides to practice his operating skills on her. As he's cutting her open, he tells Spike that there's a fly in the room and orders him, "Get... rid... of... it!", in that exact manner. Spike then runs around the room in a silly way, spraying what's supposedly bug spray into the air and then all over Friday's body, saying he did so to take care of germs, only for Doc to see that he didn't get rid of the fly and to then learn that what he was spraying was actually deodorant. Spike then teases him by spraying some underneath his armpit, prompting Doc to grab the can and toss it aside. When their operation goes awry and Friday dies, they ground some of her into meat, Spike writing on the chalkboard up front that their special is now hamburger, which is what Friday wanted when she walked in. Mort comes in and is none too pleased when he finds that they dissolved the rest of Friday in some acid, as he could have used her for his business. There's a weird moment where Doc notices the bandaged patches on Mort's head, from where Glass whacked him earlier, and Spike says, "He shaved with a...", only for whatever he said at the end there to get covered up with a "bee-boo," as if it were something really dirty. There's a bit of running gag where, when they're on their motorcycles, one of them gets a tad overzealous and comes close to wiping out. And when their next murder ends with Mort losing his bike's license plate, Doc and Spike attempt to murder him for his incompetence, only for Doc to turn on Spike when he manages to get the upper-hand on him during their struggle. They slowly lower him into the barrel of acid, him screaming like a girl until he dies and Doc telling him, "Be quiet, or you'll wake the neighbors." Upon investigating the place later, Glass hoists Spike's skeleton, which is obviously a plastic anatomy skeleton, out of the barrel.

Another gag that I have to admit I did think was funny occurs after Glass meets Thursday and takes her home with him. There's one long, fixed shot from behind the living room couch as she talks about how guy-crazy her sister is and then suggests that his playboy lifestyle is a result of some woman in his past who really hurt him. During this scene, you see Glass' arm draped over the back of the couch, a newspaper dangling from his hand, and he doesn't move at all as Thursday talks. When she sees that it's 3:45 in the morning and says that she's ready to go to bed, you suddenly hear Glass let out a loud snore, revealing that he's been asleep this whole time. Aggravated, Thursday tries to wake Glass up but all he does is drop the paper and pull his hand over the back of the couch, as she can only grumble, "Damn!" But, yet again, we go back to humor that's either stupid or inexplicable, like when Glass, after their car supposedly runs out of gas in the middle of the road, suddenly jumps into another car that passes by, leaving Thursday alone and completely helpless against Doc and Mort. I don't get what happens there. If that's supposed to be someone Glass knows, they don't say it at all, nor do they make it clear that he's going with that person to the nearest gas station in order to fetch some fuel. In fact, I assumed that the car wasn't really out of gas and he said that it was just so he could have an excuse to make a pass at Thursday. And after Doc's random and untimely demise, we cut to Mort. For a long time, I didn't know what he was up to, as he's wearing a helmet and cackling like a mad scientist over some chemicals. Plus, the movie, again, cut a little too soon as he said his line, "Now, all I need is a match." Because of that, I didn't know what he said at the end there, but hearing that it was a match, I then remembered the bomb he uses in the next scene and figured out he was making it. See, this movie is so clumsy-footed that you're often not sure of what you just saw.

The climax is just balls and, like so many other scenes, overstays its welcome. Upon blowing up a floor of Glass' office building with his bomb, Mort chases Thursday up a number of flights of stairs, as the music shifts between an old-fashioned, silent melodrama type of chase theme for the shots of Thursday running and a creeping piece that sounds like it's being played on a church organ for Mort. This gag continues until Mort chases her onto the roof, where he corners her, only to fall over the edge of the edge when he lunges at her. But, even this doesn't put an end to it, as Mort climbs back up while Thursday heads back into the building and down to Glass' office. Despite being bruised up, Mort follows her and lies in wait in a section of the office that's separated by some drapes. Thursday meets up with Detective Jennings, as he goes into his speech about how there's too much violence in the world and that it needs to be snuffed out. That's when he unknowingly stabs Mort in the forehead with a letter opener and he falls forward through the drapes. The movie still isn't over, though, as we get a silly montage of the actors (mostly those who played the victims) goofing around: Sally Lamb rises up out of her coffin, Ann Poultry does the same out of her crate, Bob (with a bandage on his head) drinks something, Friday munches on a burger and looks like she's trying to seduce you with her eyes, Rose is still lying in her sauna, Spike emerges from the acid but then gets pulled back in from behind, Doc gets up next to his crashed motorcycle, Harry Glass hoists that skeleton up and then runs off in shock, Mort (I think) is dressed up like a woman while looking out a window, Thursday flirts with Jennings, and finally, Mort lies in his own coffin, looks at the camera, and winks, as someone puts a flower on him. All of this is set to that song from before, There's Never Been A Devil Like Me, and it makes it feel like you just watched some dumb sitcom more than a gory horror-comedy. Bringing up The Last House on the Left again, this bit fits more with the movie than the awfully cheery cast roundup at the end of that one did, and maybe if I liked the movie more, I could get into this ending's zaniness, but, like everything else, I find it to be just weird.

The music was composed by Johnny White and, like so many others involved with it, The Undertaker and His Pals is his one and only credit (at least T.L.P. Swicegood was involved with some other things before he took his one shot at directing with this). As I've alluded to several times before now, the music is just as crazy as the movie itself, going from typical 60's swing and smooth jazz to sounding like something in a silent melodrama for some of the comedy and chase scenes (think of the music you'd hear in The Perils of Penelope Pitstop for an idea). A few times, the music does come off as a bit menacing but, 95% of the time, it plays up the movie's sillier, zany nature, with a constant drum piece in some scenes, a whirling saxophone in others, and a slow-paced, "road" theme for the sequence where Doc and Mort follow Harry Glass and Thursday to the former's house (this bit is used again for the ending credits). As I talked about up above, during the climactic chase, they used a creeping church organ bit for whenever Mort is onscreen, which turns into a full-blown dirge when he corners Thursday on the building's roof, and it repeats the same pattern for when he follows Thursday back into the building after seemingly falling to his death and hides in Glass' office, only to get stabbed in the forehead.

One term you definitely can't use to describe the music is forgettable, and the same goes for the songs that play during it. The first "song" is just one short lyric, sung in a very gloomy manner over the film's title after the opening scene: "Did you ever think, when the hearse goes by, that some day you are going to die?" But the really memorable song is There's Never Been A Devil Like Me, which you hear a snippet of early on but don't hear in its full glory until the ending montage. It's a crazy, insanely upbeat, swing number, sung by a guy with a very gravelly voice, that has nothing to do with the movie itself, as it's all about a guy who's absolutely girl crazy. Even so, it's definitely memorable. It starts with these lyrics: "Whenever there's a party, And all the chicks are there, I ain't the kind of fella just to stand around and stare. 'Cause I believe in action, my soul is pleasure-bent, and though I dig the chick, it's never permanent." He then goes on to a chorus of, "Oh, I cut in," "I cut up," and, "And cut up," accompanied by backup singers who chime in on each of those parts with, "Yeah, yeah," "Yeah, yeah, yeah," and, "Yes, he do. Yes, he do. Yes, he do," respectively. He says, "Oh, there's never been a devil like me, hereabouts," again accompanied by those backups singing, "No, there ain't," and, "Yeah, yeah, you can say that again," as he goes on to sing, "Oh, when a girly rolls her eyes at me, I never miss my opportunity," while they go, "C'est la vie," before going back to that "I cut in, I cut up, I cut out," chorus. Following an instrumental section, the singer returns with, "I'm always ever-ready, there's no one more alert, I don't need any coaxing when the chicks begin to flirt. I don't care if they're skinny, or fat or short or tall, it really makes no difference, 'cause I love to love 'em all." He goes to the chorus again before the song, and the movie, ends. I didn't watch this movie again for nearly two years before I decided to do this review but that song stuck with me because of how darn catchy it is.

Because of its public domain status, there are people who have affection for The Undertaker and His Pals because they saw it a lot on video and I know how that goes, trust me. But, having never even heard of it myself until 2017, I can't share in that passion at all, because all I see is a poorly-made horror comedy that continually fails when it tries to be funny. I won't deny that the movie does have some positives, like the performances by the actors who play the villains, decent gore effects, a memorably loony music score and songs, some moments that did make me smirk, and bits of dark humor that blend in with the movie's tone nicely, but overall, it doesn't work for me. Many of the main actors and characters are just "blah," there are a number of bad directing and editing choices that become aggravating over time and make me wish the movie would just end, despite how short it is, the comedy is often stupid, weird, or makes no sense, and the brutality and uncomfortable nature of some of the murder scenes can make the switch to the sillier type of comedy feel very jarring. As always, if you're one of the people who do get enjoyment out of this flick, power to you, but it's not my idea of a good time.