309. The Undertaker and His Pals

309. The Undertaker and His Pals (1966)
Director: T.L.P. Swicegood
Writer: T.L.P. Swicegood
From: Pure Terror

An undertaker and two men who run a diner murder people to serve as food.

Insert obligatory joke about a cartoon spin-off of the WWE wrestler here. Done? Done.

I have very little to say about this movie, partly because it’s just a hair over an hour long. It opens in stunning brown & white where we watch a trio of bikers murder a woman. Once she dies, the film switches to lurid color as one biker starts cutting off her legs and the trio leaves with the severed limbs. In case the tone of the movie isn’t clear, during the murder a picture of the woman’s boyfriend keeps changing in reaction to what’s going on. The flick’s a dark comedy that can be a bit hit or miss.

The trio, as I note in the super quick summary at the top is the undertaker, the owner of a diner, and the chef, although the movie sits on the reveal for a little bit for no particular purpose or payoff. The undertaker tries to weasel the grieving relatives out of money for the funeral while the pair from the diner cook and serve the limbs they steal from the bodies, usually offering them as the special of the day with a pun. For instance, the first victim’s name is “Lamb” so they’re serving Leg of Lamb.

The trio murder various people until a clue points to the undertaker as being involved. He and the chef kill the diner owner, go after more people resulting in the death of the chef, and then the undertaker dies when the head detective accidentally stabs him in the face. THE END.

The movie’s sort of whatever: it’s just not enough of any one thing. That may be unsurprising considering the run time. When it’s aiming to be comic, it’s pretty good. The first scene in the funeral parlor is played broad and hits a lot of quick absurd notes. If they’d maintained that throughout, it’d be a better movie.

Part of the problem may be the PI. He’s the boyfriend/boss of the second victim and, for lack of any competition, our hero. Only the actor is really flat. I don’t know if he’s supposed to be funny or if they wrote his part straight despite the rest of the movie being a comedy, but the movie comes to a dead stop when he’s present. The trio playing the killers seem to have the right idea—the Three Stooges as psycho killers. That’s a great idea, right? The movie doesn’t quite manage it, though, never quite reaches that far.

Another issue is that the movie starts with the trio murdering and cooking people. Where do you go from there? If you think of thematically similar pieces like Sweeny Todd or Little Shop of Horrors, you arrive at cannibalism somewhere in the second act instead of long before the story started. The movie starts at its narrative peak and then can’t maintain that energy for an hour.

The movie is legitimately funny, though, and I wish they’d written up more comic sequences. The deaths are whatever, except for one vivisection which was a line I did not expect them to cross, so you’re really waiting for the absurd sensibility of the humor to come back whenever you’re watching a death scene. I’m pretty lukewarm about the whole thing. I wouldn’t recommend it, but I wouldn’t steer anyone away from it either.