ZOMBIES ON BROADWAY / RKO - 1945

Welcome everbloody to tonite's Moldie Oldie Fun Feature supplied to us once again by Prof. Grewbeard, it's ZOMBIES ON BROADWAY and stars RKO's answer to Hope & Crosby and Abbott & Costello in the mid-forties, Brown & Carney!! Throw in Bela Lugosi, Anne Jeffreys and Sheldon Leonard, and you gots yerself a barrell of laffs!! And, because its RKO, this is a great little production all the way around!

Music is by Roy Webb, who had a whopping 264 composing and also 11 soundtrack credits from 1929-60! Check out some titles he worked on... ALIAS FRENCH GERTIE, AGGIE APPLEBY - MAKER OF MEN, HIPS, HIPS HORRAY, AUTOBUYOGRAPHY, CRACKED SHOTS, KENTUCKY KERNELS, SILLY BILLIES, NIGHT WAITRESS, BRINGING UP BABY, THE MAD MISS MANTON, BOY SLAVES, WILDCAT BUS, TOM, DICK AND HARRY, CAT PEOPLE, HITLER'S CHILDREN and THE BODY SNATCHER!

So, time for the show!.. Come on in little Dungeon helper and buddy, Rufus The Gnat. Here's the big red 'GO' button for you to press and start our Eariffic Earclip! Hit it, Rufus!.. ZOMBIES ON BROADWAY!

Wally Brown and Alan Carney play Jerry and Mike, they're publicity agents who are hired by gangster Sheldon (I SPY) Leonard to promote a nightclub called... The Zombie Hut! To their chagrin, they'll find themselves on the island of San Sebastiane where they are to try and bring back a real (live?) Zombie for the club's opening!!

Mike and Jerry get a lesson in voodoo and zombies before they head for the island. Check out the black Cadillac!

Leave it up to RKO to have a teriffic shot like this of an island!

Here's Sir Lancelot as the uncredited calypso singer who greets the passengers with a song as they leave the ship.

Of course, Bela's up to his old tricks, this time he's another zombie master using terror to rule the territory!

Darby Jones plays Kolaaga, The Zombie. Darby had a total of 32 acting credits which includes TARZAN THE FEARLESS, SWING HIGH, SWING LOW, TARZAN'S NEW YORK ADVENTURE, I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE, QUEEN OF THE AMAZONS and ZAMBA!

This is Angela Gomez as the knife throwing dancer at a club on the island. Here, she busts this guy's liquor bottle just as he take a big swig.

Okay, that is one freaky still!.. Probably not recommended for wallpaper on your desktop!!

Mike is captured by Kolaaga and turned into a zombie by Bela. You have to admit, the zombie eye makeup is very effective and is a real hoot when Mike smiles!! They must have been cracking up on the set!!

Here's a classic comedy routine with Bela, the monkey that stole his syringe is hiding in the chest, Bela opens up one drawer and the monkey pops up in a different one, like in Scooby-Doo, good stuff.

Kolaaga, fed up with Bela, tosses him into a freshly dug open grave!!

The natives stop Jerry, Mike and Jean from boarding the ship, but when they see that Mike is a zombie, they run like Hell! Mike is then to be the zombie needed for the club's opening...

While waiting to go on stage, Mike starts staring at a showgirl while she takes off a stocking...

And viola, female anatomy snaps him out of his zombified state and jolts him back to the the land of the living. Looks like Jerry's doing pretty good himself!

The boss is tricked and he becomes the Zombie for the opening...

So, Mike gets the last laff, and he thinks Jerry got turned into the real hero, the uncredited lil' monkey!!

Ghoulnight Everbloody!!..

HAVE ROCKET--WILL TRAVEL - Duning/Styne - "Somebody Dropped A Rocket" (1959)

"Have Rocket--Will Travel" is an insane movie for sure, but the most insane part is that it is almost impossible to find a copy for some damn reason, I mean come on, it's the freakin' Three Stooges! Doesn't every person alive deserve to see everything ever done by the Three Stooges or what? What's wrong with the world today? (Breaking News!! I searched for almost two years to find a copy of this movie, and as I wrote this, I just found this Crackle site where "Have Rocket Will Travel" streams full screen beautifully, Enjoy, because this is your lucky day!) The world is redeemed for one fleeting moment!!

Sweet stock shot to get things rolling, and set the scene at the "National Space Foundation!"

Our heroes Larry, Moe, and Curly-Joe are the Maintenance Men at the facility, that reads, I.E. janitors, three each! I don't think I have ever in my life had anybody tell me that they thought the Three Stooges were gay! They just slept together because they were good buddies! It didn't have to be sexual back in the 50's! And to think people want to talk crap about SpongeBob!

A dud rocket lands by their living quarters with a monkey in it, and when they get digging to get to the hatch, Moe bends the pick on Curly-Joe's head! Kids, don't try this trick at home!!

This is so stupid, it's one of my favorite gags, where they are trying to lift up a hatch door, that they're standing on!!

They finally get in to save the monkey and there's this cute scene where Curly-Joe and the monkey are making faces at each other....

....and right at the cut, the little sumbitch puts his head down and bites Curly-Joe right on the hand! Tabonga told me that both Curly-Joe and Joe Besser admitted that they didn't dig being Stooges that much, because they got hurt too much, and I believe it!! The original iconic Curly Howard died way back in 1952 and was never in a full length Stooges flick! His position was then filled by Shemp Howard (the original third member), Joe Besser as Joe, who quit after two years because he didn't like getting hit, and finally Joe DeRita as Curly-Joe!

The boys take a lab coffee break with beautiful scientist Anna-Lisa as Dr. Ingrid Naarveg, who they are very smitten with!

I just like this shot of the three of them!! Moe Howard was 62 years old when this film was made!

In order to help Dr. Ingrid, the boys invent a new rocket fuel by putting everything in the lab including popcorn in a big vat. Larry accidentally becomes a victim of the big switcheroo, and drinks some of the rocket fuel!

The music for "Have Rocket--Will Travel" was conducted by another Dungeon fave, Mischa Bakaleinikoff, who might be the all time champion of composers with a massive 458 credits either as Composer, Musical Director, or Composer of stock music!

Their launch into space was one big mistake, and then they land on Venus, which looks suspiciously like the foothills of California!!

Wonder where they got this idea, the movie, "Tarantula" was made 4 years earlier! Well, at least they mixed it up a little and made this Venusian tarantula be able to shoot death rays at their butts!

The original theme song music was written by George Duning, and the lyrics were written by Stanley Styne, and the song is reprised here after the boys meet a Talking Unicorn on Venus, and find out they can breathe!

The Talking Unicorn leads them to this totally bitchin' Venusian Space Car that was probably a Mercury, since they were the only company cool enough to have cars named The Comet, or The Meteor. Shows you where it got them since Ford decided to drop the whole Mercury line as of this year!

Next they are taken to see the Grandmaster of Venus, the big guy in charge, The Talking Robot!!

First thing the robot does is shrink them down to size, and put them in a bird cage!

Then the big boss robot does a mind meld on them, which creates an exact set of duplicated evil Stooge robots, who chase them around for a while until they are able to finally escape, get back past the giant tarantula again, and blast off back to earth! Whew!!

Once safely back on earth, the boys are treated like the heroes that they really are!

But these are The Three Stooges we're talking about, so before you know it, Larry's on his knees getting stomped on the dance floor, Curly-Joe gets a face full of cake, and a spring stuck on his butt, and like always, Moe just loses it!

Nadia Sanders is the tall and gorgeous calm before the storm!

And then before you know it again, all Hell is breaking out at this high society party, and everybody is getting involved, but it's not like it was unexpected!

The evil robots followed them all the way back to earth, so the boys ditch the whole scene, steal the Mercury, and head back out into space and The End!! It's a beautiful moment!!