Spooks! (1953)

Directed by:

Jules White

The 148th (!) Three Stooges short finds Moe (Moe Howard), Larry (Larry Fine) and the cowardly Shemp (Shemp Howard) running the Super Slueth (that's not my misspelling) Detective Agency. The frantic George B. Bopper (uncredited Frank Mitchell) shows up looking for help. His daughter, Mary (Norma Randall), went to get the morning paper and didn't come back... and that was 26 hours ago. Mr. Bopper leaves a photo of the missing girl. Moe comes up with the idea to dress up as chefs and go house to house giving out free samples of pie. They end up at the right place and, after hearing a woman's scream from outside, decide to sneak in through the window.

Mary has been kidnapped by mad scientist Dr. Jeckyl (Philip Van Zandt) and his brutish assistant Mr. Hyde (Tom Kennedy). Jeckyl is planning on transferring Mary's brain into a man-in-a-suit gorilla in his lab. Once they discover the Stooges are inside, they attempt to kill them using an arsenal of weapons that would make Jason envious, including a knife, a cleaver, a sickle, a pitchfork, a hammer, an axe, a baseball bat and even a makeshift flamethrower that sets Larry's ass on fire.

Gags include the usual slaps, eye pokes, kicks in the ass and nose pulls accompanied by bone-breaking noises, plus a mousetrap on the tongue, a pen stuck in a nose, lots of trap door usage and some genuinely strange stuff like a mounted winged dog puppet (?!) that comes to life. Shemp even has a second role as a a bat with a human head that goes "Gib gib gib gib gib ruff ruff" to which the actor winces, "What a hideous monstrous face!" You can definitely see what an influence this had on Sam Raimi's EVIL DEAD II (1987) in spots.

Little-known actor Van Zandt has been an unexpected pleasure in these shorts playing the heavy so it was sad to learn he killed himself just a few years after appearing in this. And if you're wondering why legs, fingers, hypodermic needles, roman candles, pies, weapons and other things get thrust directly at the camera, it's because this was one of only two Stooges shorts (the other was the same year's Pardon My Backfire) to be released to theaters in 3D. Spooks was screened theatrically before, and even name drops, the Columbia 3D western Fort Ti (1953). 

Both Spooks and Pardon were later included as extras on the Indicator Blu-ray release of the Vincent Price 3D vehicle The Mad Magician (1954). Columbia also released this with 21 other shorts on their The Three Stooges Collection: Volume Seven, which covers 1952-1954.

★★1/2

Scotched in Scotland (1954)

Directed by:

Edward Bernds (uncredited)

Jules White

The Stooges (Moe Howard, Shemp Howard and Larry Fine) barely graduate from the "Wide Awake Detective School" with the lowest grades in the school's history. They're such an embarrassment that Dean O.U. Gonga (Philip Van Zandt) decides to give them their diplomas in private as not to publicly humiliate himself. As per the school's promise, the Dean then has to help them get jobs. Suspecting that no one in the U.S. will hire them, he sends them off to Glenheather Castle in Scotland where valuable gold antiques keep disappearing. The staff blame ghosts. The objective for the new graduates is to uncover who the real thieves are.

Upon arrival in Scotland, the guys dress in kilts and adopt the aliases of McMoe, McLarry and McShemp, all while putting on fake accents to blend in with the locals. Castle owner The Earl of Glenheather (Herbert Evans) has to go to a function and tasks the Stooges to watch over his valuables while he's away. He's left in the company of the castle's servants, Lorna Doone (Christine McIntyre), Angus (Charles Knight) and McPherson (Theodore Lorch) who are, of course, the real thieves. They then decide to try to scare the detectives away so they can make their next, and they hope final, haul.

The "scares" basically just involve one of the guys wearing a mask and another guy dressing up as an Arab Sheikh (?!) There are about 50 head hits crammed into 15 minutes for Stooge devotees but many of the gags here seem subpar and unimaginative. The best bits revolve around a bed that can moved between two rooms and a parrot that gets inside of a skull and starts flying around. There's also a bagpipe-playing skeleton.

Most disappointingly, the bulk of this 15 ½ minute short has been swiped from an earlier Stooges short called The Hot Scots (1948), which is two minutes longer. The differences between the two come in the first few scenes. In Hot Scots, the Stooges come to Scotland Yard with their mail order detective school diplomas looking for "yard" work and end up instead getting put to work doing actual yard (lawn) jobs, where they find their "assignment" while picking up trash. That leads them to the castle instead of them being assigned to it by a school dean eager to get rid of them. If that wasn't enough pilfering, the opening few scenes from Hot Scots were also grafted onto another Stooges short called Hot Ice (1955), which otherwise involved a gorilla and a diamond heist.

Columbia Pictures offers this on DVD in their The Three Stooges Collection: Volume Seven, which includes their shots made from 1952 to 1954.

★★

Dopey Dicks (1950)

Directed by:

Edward Bernds

Moe (Moe Howard), Larry (Larry Fine) and Shemp (Shemp Howard) are moving men / cleaners who've been hired to straighten up private detective Sam Shovel's office. After they finish, naturally making a mess with paint and a feather duster in the process, a terrified “beautiful dame” barges into the office claiming to be in terrible danger. She – Louise (Christine McIntyre) – informs them that someone's been following her and that her life is in danger. While the stooges are out examining the hallway, a man in a black coat, hat and gloves sneaks into the office and snatches her up. She's nice enough to leave behind some of her jewelry as payment, as well as a note telling them to come rescue her at 275 Mortuary Road.

Meanwhile, Professor Potter (Philip Van Zandt) and his assistant Ralph (Stanley Price) are busy at work trying to create an army of indestructible robot men. Only problem is, they've thus far been unable to keep the robots from walking into things and destroying themselves. You know, because they can't actually see anything. A light bulb goes off. What if they could somehow transplant a human head onto the robot? The Professor already has a handy machine (a table with a guillotine blade activated by the push of a button) for a clean decapitation. Now they just need a head donor. The doorbell rings...

Moe, Larry and Shemp arrive at the address on the note, which also happens to be the mad doctor's hideout. Though he likes Larry's prominent forehead, seeing how Moe is the "brains of the operation" Ralph picks him to go see Potter. The Professor then attempts to decapitate him with the machine. When that fails, he tries to stab him with a sword. Larry gets a Venus flytrap stuck on his face while Shemp locates a tied-up-and-gagged Louise. After freeing her, someone attempts to stab him and much of the rest of this is one long chase scene as the Stooges try to avoid the doctor and his assistant (who are revealed to actually be mental home escapees) as they run around with knives and cleavers attempting to cut off their heads. Fun for the entire family!

This has the expected Stooges-style slapstick involving constantly hitting each other over the head with things, running into walls, etc. accompanied by cartoon sound effects, along with lots of secret passageways and Grade A hamming from the bad guys, whose obsession with killing the Stooges actually borders on creepy! It's pretty funny.

While the comedy team Abbott and Costello have a genre reputation for their series of horror-comedies, the Stooges do not despite starring in even more. The difference? A&C made features with top stars like Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney Jr. and got to use the Universal stable of classic monsters while T3S only starred together in shorts featuring lesser known actors. Their others include We Want Our Mummy (1939), Spook Louder (1943), If a Body Meets a Body (1945), The Ghost Talks (1949), Who Done It? (1949; also directed by Bernds), Spooks! (1953), SCOTCHED IN SCOTLAND (1954), which stole most of its footage from Bernds' 1948 short The Hot Scot, and Creeps (1956).

The Stooges shorts are all available on DVD collections from Columbia Pictures. Dopey Dicks is included on Volume 6, which includes 24 shorts made from 1949 to 1951.

★★★