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.

★★★

Nightmare at Elm Manor (1961)

... aka: Flesh and Fantasie

... aka: Nude in Dracula's Castle

Directed by:

Harrison Marks (uncredited)

After a failed career as part of a music hall comedy duo, director Marks started work as a photographer. In the early 50s he was supplying photographs to publishers on a freelance basis but eventually opened his own studio in Soho. It was there that he formed his company Kamera and became one of the UK's top glamour photographers. And by “glamour,” I mean nude. His company produced their own magazines (the primary one was called Kamera but there were off-shoots like Solo), calendars, cards, photography books and more. In 1960, he branched out further and started making “nudie-cutie” shorts that were distributed on 8mm by the company's new label, Kamera Cine Films. Most of theses were simple little shorts with a little harmless T&A but later on became a bit more explicit to cater to the times. This is one of the earliest of these, runs just 5 minutes and is a showcase for model and former topless dancer June Palmer, who was very popular in England at the time.

Some of the models who started out in Marks' shorts even showed up in legitimate films. Palmer, for instance, had an uncredited bit in Hammer's TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA (1970) while fellow nude model Pamela Green, who dated Marks at the time, was prominently featured in Michael Powell's classic Peeping Tom (1960), on which Marks served as an uncredited "photographic consultant." Years later, she also made an appearance in the Peter Cushing film Legend of the Werewolf (1975). Perhaps most notable was Sue Bond, who started out in softcore shorts for Marks like Hot Teddy and then tried to deny ever working for him after she got a semi-recurring role on The Benny Hill Show and some mainstream TV guest spots.

With suitcase in hand, a young woman (Palmer) makes her way through the woods and then to the Elm Manor Hotel. She's greeted at the door by a creepy man (played by Marks' former comedy duo partner Stuart Samuels) and then goes to her room. From here on out she's faced with one terror after another; losing both her composure and her wardrobe. While putting on lipstick in front of a mirror, a caped vampire appears behind her. When she turns around he's gone. She then goes downstairs for some water, where the vampire-butler chases her around for a few minutes until she collapses in bed. The next morning she awakens unharmed. Believing her visions from the previous night were merely a nightmare, she goes downstairs where a surprise awaits her.

There's really not much to go into here. This runs about 5 minutes and is a semi-interesting curio. While there's no dialogue, some added spooky music helps. Aesthetically, it looks more like something made in the 1920s than the 60s and the grainy photography and harsh lighting actually do give it a creepy feel. It also succeeds in giving us a nice look at Palmer, who shows plenty of T and a little A, though keeps the P covered with her nightgown. It's easy to see why she was so popular back then with her beautiful face and voluptuous physique.

A number of Marks' other shorts are also horror in nature. There was Witches Brew (1960) starring Green as a witch and Marks as a hunchback, Vampire (1963) starring Wendy Luton and the director as Dracula, Perchance to Scream (1967) starring Jane Paul and involving women being terrorized in a torture chamber and the mad scientist tale Dolly Mixture (1973) starring Clyda Rosen, which was released in both hard and softcore versions. The former runs 19 minutes and was released in Germany as Vor Geilheit kochen ("Boiling with Lust").

The Alternative Cinema print is called Nude in Dracula's Castle. Many of these are available to view on the BFI website, although you have to be British to be able to see them. Others (including this one) have leaked onto both archive.org and Youtube.

★★1/2