The Undertaker and His Pals (1966)

Once rather aptly released on a double bill with The Corpse Grinders, The Undertaker and His Pals is a weird melange of gore, body horror and slapstick comedy.  It has all the hall marks of a low budget movie of its era: the California locations, hugely variable acting performances, awkward dialogue and perfunctory plotting, often tinny sound and shaky camera work.  But what sets it apart from its contemporaries is its sheer, well, weirdness.  Its main inspiration seems to have been the films of Herschell Gordon Lewis, with their gallons of gore and animal entrails as various members of the cast are carved up.  But it adds to this a whole series of sight gags, slapstick and camp performances.  The result is a beguiling, if mainly misfiring, horror comedy.  The gags range from the surreal - watch the framed photo of the sailor during the pre-credits murder, his facial expression changes to one of shock as the knives go in, before he covers his eyes in horror the next time the camera cuts to the photo - to the lame - the undertaker's skateboard aide pratfall, for instance.  Much of the would be humour comes from left-field, with no real connection to the action on screen: the aforementioned pratfall, for instance, or the customer getting Spike in the face with a custard pie in the diner.

All of the gags are accompanied by a soundtrack which includes the 'wah-wah-wah' sound when someone falls over and, during the climactic chase, provides musical cues for the characters (the imperiled heroine is accompanied by a tinkling silent movie style piano, while every time the camera cuts back to the pursuing undertaker, switches to a villainous organ score).  Some of the dialogue comes over better in comedic terms, with the undertaker taking a grieving father to one side as he and his wife are viewing the body of their daughter, to pay the extortionate bill, telling him that this is the best time to do it, as his outrage will help him forget his grief.  Indeed, probably the outstanding performance of the film comes from Ray Dannis as Morton, the undertaker.  Dannis, a veteran of B-movies and bit parts (he was also in The Corpse Grinders) seizes upon what was surely his biggest role to deliver a performance of high camp.  When he isn't trying to wheedle his way around prospective customers, trying to get them to sign bogus contracts on the promise of cheap funerals, he is remonstrating with his co-conspirators for trying to double cross him by murdering victims without telling him.  At at least one point he even breaks the fourth wall, addressing the audience directly.

The plot of The Undertaker and His Pals is straightforward:  Morton is in cahoots with Spike and Doc, who run a scuzzy diner actually called 'The Greasy Spoon', to murder random women and partially dismember them.  The bits they cut off end up providing the meat dishes at 'The Greasy Spoon', while the rest of the victims end up providing business for Mort's funeral parlour.  Their activities attract the attention of both the police and private eye Harry Glass.  Mort specialises in offering cheap funerals which, after his various 'add ons' end up costing a small fortune.  (When Glass insists Mort stick to the quoted price for his murdered secretary's funeral, he finds that the undertaker has interred her in a crate rather than a coffin).  For their part, Spike and Doc (a med school drop out), specialise in turning their victims into dishes which play on their name: Sally Lamb ends up as 'leg of lamb', while Anne Poultry becomes 'chicken breast'.  Unfortunately, the film-makers clearly ran out of inspiration for these meat-related character names: the next victim is called Friday and ends up as plain 'hamburger', as this was what she was trying to order before she was murdered.  Inevitably, despite not being much of a detective, Glass starts to figure out the scheme (but only after losing two secretaries to it) and the undertaker, Spike and Doc begin to fall out.

Ultimately, the plot is simply there to loosely string together a series of gory murders and several slapstick routines and never really hangs together convincingly.  Its progress relies far too much upon coincidence and inexplicable events (how did Friday's sister Thursday know that Glass was looking for a secretary when she didn't know him either, for instance).  But none of that really matters as that isn't really what The Undertaker and His Pals is about.  Rather than attempting to present a properly coherent story, its real intent seems to be to parody the low budget gore films of the kind made by Herschell Gordon Lewis, which were beginning to gather cult followings.  Consequently, the sort of bloody killings presented in deadly seriousness in these gore movies are here usually conducted with some comedic element: the sailor's photo in the first, the whole business with the fly spray when Friday is dismembered, for instance.  That said, the gore is laid on thick, although, in truth, it isn't very convincing, and the final attack, when a woman in a sauna is beaten with a chain, (which, for no good reason, is hanging from the ceiling of the sauna), seems entirely gratuitous and overly brutal.

So, what are we to make of The Undertaker and His Pals?  Well, its bizarre mixture of gore and broad comedy is ultimately undermined by the usual ineptness of execution which, all too often, is the hallmark of this kind of movie.  Sound effects often don't synch with the action on screen, confusing execution of key scenes, (Harry Glass's fate, in particular, is very poorly handled, leaving the viewer unclear as to what has actually happened), amateurish performances from some of the supporting cast and choppy editing all militate against the film's effectiveness.  Moreover, the relentless victimisation and objectification of women becomes wearying long before the end of the film.  That said, the main cast all give enthusiastic performances (with the exception of 'Rad Fulton' as Harry Glass) and the film is carried forward on a wave of its own delirium.  Some sequences are actually pretty well shot - the opening murder, with the circling motorcyclists, for instance - but tend to go on too long.  The wonderfully named writer/director, TLP Swicegood, seems never to have made another film.  His only other screen credits seem to be as a writer on an episode of The Untouchables and again on another low budget movie, Escape From Hell Island (1963).  One of the film's biggest pluses is that it only runs sixty three minutes, meaning that it never quite outstays its welcome.  It would be tempting to dismiss The Undertaker and His Pals as a piece of campy trash.  But there is just something about it which raises it to a different level of weirdness.  Not a classic, by any stretch of the imagination, but a curiosity in a class of its own.