DETOUR - Erdody - "Get Back On Track, Jack" (1945)

 "DETOUR!"

You're going one way, and your life decides to take you a completely different direction, and there's nothing you can do about it, except go along for the ride!

"Detour!" What a great title and what a great word! Nobody knows where a detour is going to take them, unless it's a route they travel every day, and that's exactly what this film is all about, being lost!

Well, you can't get much more lost looking than this poor slob known as Al Roberts, and for good reason, considering his bio, Tom (The Brute Man) Neal might not have had to act so hard to look this miserable! As an amateur boxer, he had a record of 44-3 with 41 Knockouts, so he was a pretty tough guy, but in 1965 he let things get out of control and he was convicted of shooting his wife to death! He got off on involuntary manslaughter and served 6 years of his 10 year sentence! He didn't even make it another year after his release before dying at the age of 58 with a bad ticker!

"I Can't Believe That You're in Love with Me" written by Jimmy McHugh and Clarence Gaskill is playing on the jukebox, and it's about to drive poor Al Roberts beserk! Most of the rest of the music in the movie was written by one of those people who liked to only go by one name: Erdody!!

Flash back to better times when he was performing the same song with his sweetheart Claudia (The Face Of Marble) Drake as Sue Harvey! If he could only turn back the hands of time!

Sue is heading off to California to try and better her singing career, and she's leaving Al behind!

It doesn't take long before Al gets the bright idea that he ought to head on out to California too, and join the girl of his dreams! Right about here is where the "Detour" begins!

Al gets picked up by a nice enough guy who talks too much, pops pills, and has some big gnarly looking scratches on the back of his right hand, but he's headed all the way to California, and that seems great as far as Al is concerned! Let it be known that Al is also broke!! Al's new friend is named Charlie Haskell Jr. and was played by Edmund (The Invisible Man Returns) MacDonald. Six years after "Detour" was made Edmund would be dead at the age of 43 from a brain hemorrhage!

Sue's career seems to be heading in all the right directions!

 Al's meantime, not so! Don't know if it was the pills, or if Charlie just had a heart attack while Al was taking his turn at the wheel, but whatever it was, he's of no further use to this world! Al hits the panic button and decides that they would never believe the story of a poor hitchhiker, so he ditches the body and pockets Charlie's dough, and decides that until he gets to California, for now, he's going to be Charles Haskell Jr.! They didn't have picture IDs back then and the description on the Driver's License was close enough!

When you're out driving around and you don't know where you are, and then you have to take a detour and end up God knows where, and if that's not confusing enough, the detour has a detour, well, that's what's about to happen to Al Roberts, when he coincidentally runs into the crazy mama of all detours when he stops to get some gas! She seems innocent enough! Omigod Al! Don't fall for it!!

Meet Ann (Scared Stiff) Savage as simply Vera! Day or night, Vera doesn't change, she's very pretty, but there's something brewing inside her, and it's a strange brew, no doubt!

It's not long before Vera lets Al know that she knows he's not Charlie Haskell. She should know, because she's the reason he had all those scratch marks on his hand! How incredibly lucky Al was to pick her up!

Vera's got all kinds of plans for Al posing as Charlie, but it's all about to come to a head, and essentially she is holding him as a kidnap victim, and he better cooperate or else she will tell the authorities that he killed Charlie!

After seeing this newspaper clipping, Vera gets the big idea that Al should pose as Charles Jr. after the old man kicks off, and collect a big inheritance that they can share!

Al doesn't like it, and feels like he's stuck in between a rock and the big house, so one night when they're drinking and playing cards, the happy couple gets into an argument, and Vera says she's going to call the cops, and storms off into the bedroom with the long phone cord trailing behind her! Yeah, I know that you kids today don't know what a phone cord is, so look it up, it's essential to the story!

Psycho bitch Vera is drunker than snot, and kind of trips over the bed with the phone cord all wrapped around her and passes out!

The door is locked, so in an attempt to stop Vera from calling the police, Al starts yanking on the phone cord hoping to make Vera let go of it!

Whoa! Major Bummer! The cord was wrapped around Vera's neck, and now she's deader than a doornail!

And that's why Al is in the shape he's in! Two deaths, one by accident, and one by association, but in the eyes of the authorities, he will be guilty as Hell! Life is filled with detours, the last one I took brought me to Amazon Prime and this movie, I hope the next one is as good! (Surprise, Surprise, an even better detour, I just found out that "Detour" also streams for free at the Internet Archive!) Now you don't have any reason to not watch it!

THE VAMPIRE LOVERS / AIP - Hammer Film Productions - 1970

It's Vampire Monday with Tabonga, here at The Dungeon!.. Here's one sexy flick from the Hammer gang starring Peter Cushing, Ingrid Pitt, Jon Finch and Ferdy Mayne, all about vampires in the house! I chose these posters because they really catch your eye! The movie got an R Rating because of bare boobs...

Here are two stills from the flashback at the beginning of the movie, Baron Hartog has a close encounter with a sexy vampire chick who gets her pretty little head detached from her body with a sword!

Eegah!! sent over a sound clip with a surprise ending for our earjoyment, sooooo, you can push the big red 'GO' button located there by our atomic garlic patch, NOW, Ralphie The Tarantula!.. Here's a bloody taste of... THE VAMPIRE LOVERS!

It's all a ton of fun for this waltzing crowd...

Yeah, until this mysterious figure with a red Christmas bow shows up unannounced!

After Marcilla, played by Ingrid Pitt, arrives at the General's house as a guest, his daughter Laura starts having vivid nightmares and does some over the top screaming as heard in the sound clip. Peter plays the General.

The doctor, played by Ferdy Mayne, examines Laura and discovers two bite marks on her boob!

Marcilla, the vampire, then sets her sights on pretty little Emma, who's putty in her hands!

The doctor orders the maid to put lots of garlic plants in Laura's room. When Marcilla goes into the room, she's terrified by the sight and smell!

So, she follows the doctor into the woods and deep sixes his ass!

The General and his small band of vampire killers discover Marcilla's resting place in a crypt, and, a portrait of the vampire queen, Carmilla, who are one in the same!

Near the end, Marcilla is no match for this cross on a dagger and disappears into thin air, returning to her coffin in the crypt.

It's not long before the General and pals open her coffin and run a stake through her heart, then, to make sure, decapitate her with a sword. In this flick, it's the only way to make sure the job is done!

FIREBALL JUNGLE - Joseph P. Mawra (1968)

"Fireball Jungle" is the closest thing to insanity I've experienced lately! It might just be the perfect movie! It took me almost seven years to finally see "Fireball Jungle" and I expected to be disappointed, but boy, was I surprised! As they would say back in the day, "This movie is something else!" With a title composed of two words not normally used together, and in "Thundering Color," get ready, cause here it comes!!

  "FIREBALL JUNGLE!" 

 Welcome to the Dwayger Dungeon Saturday Night 1968 Sensation! Just like about everything else that has to do with this movie, I have no idea who is singing this cool theme song but that shouldn't stop you from enjoying it!! It's one of the best we've ever had the pleasure of playing for you!

It's a cat eats dog world out there on the racetrack, and two drivers have died recently and senselessly!

The racing association is investigating those two deaths on the track, and they've got strong feelings that something crooked is going on, maybe mob related, and maybe these driver's deaths weren't mere accidents, but Meares accidents!

At the center of attention is a young driver by the name of Ronald Elwood "Cateye" Meares!"  Cateye explains to the board that he feels absolutely terrible about those deaths, but that his only involvement was that he plays to win! Cateye is played by Alan Mixon in his only one of two big screen forays! Over the course of 35 years, Alan had 9 acting performances!

Here we have Nancy (Car 54, Where Are You) Donohue as Ann Tracey, and Randy (Pink Cadillac) Kirby as Steve Cullen! Steve is the new racer on the circuit, but he's not using his real name since he's really just there to investigate how his brother got killed! Bottom line is, he's looking for trouble!

So, new guy Steve is winning races, and Cateye doesn't dig it, so he and his boys show Steve the other side of his personality he didn't share with the racing commission! Cateye reminds me of Randy Orton with that smug and devious smile of his!

Cut to the local bar where on stage is the one hit wonder pop psych band Mercy performing their #2 hit single "Love (Can Make You Happy)," a song that wouldn't be released until six months later!

Okay, can anybody tell me what in the Hell is going on here? Is this a Redneck movie or a Hippie movie? Cutting edge, I think "Fireball Jungle" might have been the first real Redneck Hippie movie!

 

So that's pretty much the storyline, confrontation after confrontation between Steve and Cateye and his boys!

One of the headlining actors on the poster is Lon Chaney Jr. in one of his last performances! Lon plays the slow but steady junker Sammy, conjuring up some of his 1940 performance as Lennie in John Steinbeck's "Of Mice And Men!" Sammy likes to drink, and Lon is a natural! His dog even brings him his beer!!

The other headliner on the poster is John Russell as the big bad cheese called simply Nero! Mr. Nero has his own private golf course and lovely entourage of ladies, and doesn't liked to be disturbed by the simpletons that are making him money like Cateye! John Russell will always be remembered for his run as Marshall Dan Troop on 156 episodes of "The Lawman" from 1958 to 1962!! The two so-called stars probably have a combined screen time of about 15 minutes! Nice swing!

Now it's time to go back to another club with a a guy I can't find anything out about backed by a band called I haven't got a clue!

Imagine that, Steve and Cateye are not seeing things eye to eye again, and just when Steve thought he was going to have a nice quiet evening alone with Ann!

And then suddenly Director Joseph P. Mawra unleashes a fireball of totally unexpected amazement and completely different proportions! Welcome to "The Throne Room!" Yep, it's exactly what you thought it was! A masked bartender, and toilets for chairs! I guess this was Joseph's big shot at main stream media, since some of his other directorships included titles like "Olga's House Of Shame," "The Peek Snatchers," and "Savages From Hell," so he decided to make the most of it!

I don't know about you, but the whole beer tapper in the urinal doesn't look that appealing to me! That's where I usually put the beer when I'm through with it, not where I want to get it from!

The denizens of the "Throne Room" are an odd lot at best! There's this girl with eyeballs painted on her eyelids!

There's these two interesting couples and.........

.......This pair of rats!!!!

Then this checkerboard gal walks into the room, and suddenly, my fuzzy little brain screamed out as loud as it could! Can anybody give me a clue as to what in the fuck is going on here??

And then I got the answer when this whack job and his howling poodle did their schtick!! I thought I had changed channels without knowing and was now watching "The Gong Show!"  I don't know how they pulled it off, but somehow all this nonsense makes sense!

Then there was the beach party and the subsequent cat fight! After the fight is over, they hook one gal up to a motorcycle and drag her around the beach for a while just for kicks!

They had some pretty good stunt men working on this movie!

In the end, Cateye has to make a run for it, but more strange shit happens, basically for no reason at all, he gets in a fist fight with this big Redneck at a gas station, while the guy's Momma starts whacking him with a broom! Cateye barely escapes with his life, and the viewer is left in awe and wonder!

Cateye makes it back to the track a few laps late, and gets into his # 7 car, and starts driving like a madman, and you really get the feeling he wants to go out in a blaze of glory.......

..........And can you imagine that? That's exactactly what happens!! "Fireball Jungle!" I can't tell you where you can find it, all I can do is tell you that you should try! It changed my life forever!!

FIREBALL!!