Strictly average movie

Excellent but underrated film

A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

Comedy/horror The Undertaker and His Pals is the best H. G. Lewis film he never directed. If I didn't know better, I would have sworn that this was the work of the legendary 'godfather of gore', the humour and graphic splatter in exactly the same spirit as Lewis's better films like The Gore Gore Girls and 2000 Maniacs; the real culprit, however, is one-time-only director T.L.P. Swicegood, who had clearly been taking careful notes while down at the drive-in.Swicegood's film follows three, vicious motorcycle riding sickos who randomly select pretty girls to murder, two of the killers, proprietors of a greasy spoon cafe, taking body parts to serve up as food, while the third, the undertaker of the title (played by Ray Dannis), making his living by approaching the recently bereaved and offering his professional services. Investigating the killings is private-eye Harry Glass (James Westmoreland).As with Lewis's films, the gore is cheaply executed and not particularly convincing, but gruesome enough to please fans of vintage splatter, with a meat-cleaver in the face, an impalement on a spiked fence, a stabbing, dismemberment and some internal organ fondling. The humour varies from the surreal (a photograph of a man changing expressions as the first girl is killed), to the corny (the descriptions of the dishes served up at the cafe relate to the victim's names), to the knockabout (the undertaker accidentally stepping on a skateboard), to the slapstick (a classic pie in the face gag).The film also offers up plenty of 'cheesecake', with several curvaceous cuties showing a little skin before falling foul of the killers, further qualifying the film as an entertaining '60s cult oddity, despite its obvious budgetary drawbacks.

This very well may be the first slasher film ever made, and the really weird thing, it is also the first parody of a slasher film ever made.Therein lies a real social-historical problem: how can the film effectively creating the genre at the same time parody the genre, which doesn't come into existence until the film is released? First, a qualification: What makes a slasher film is extremely graphic gratuitous violence against helpless women, using a long knife as preferred weapon.Arguably, the real "first" of the genre may have been "Psycho"; but "Psycho" was an exceptional film, and stands out from most of the rest of the genre. And it's in black & white, while a true slasher film requires blood-glaring color (which "Undertaker" has, and remarkably well-kept for its age). I prefer to think of "Psycho" as a precursor.But "Undertaker" is, first of all, nothing special as a film. (It's just low-budget drive-in fodder, intended to be ignored by the teen-agers necking in the back seat.) Secondly, it takes sadistic-voyeur pleasure in showing us the violence and the blood. Finally, it shows self-consciousness concerning the sadistic-voyeurism, meaning that it is intended to appeal to the very worst instincts in its target audience.And that makes it pure genre film - well, almost.As I said, it is also a parody of this genre - in the most outrageous way. The sales pitch the undertaker offers potential customers is genuinely amusing, and the killers repeatedly debunk themselves as silly mad-scientist types that only happen to run a failing diner. What's going on here? There can be only one answer, logically: the film-makers here are actually parodying another genre film.Perhaps "Psycho" can help us out here, after all. It must be remembered that a major influence on Hitchcock's's film was the motel sequence in Orson Welles' "Touch of Evil". That episode was itself influenced by the '50s "JD" (juvenile delinquent) films that frequently had middle-class suburban families found suddenly in the grip of a punk or a gang of young punks (the most famous being Brando's "The Wild One"). And the JD film was itself a clear off-shoot from the standard B-movie crime-thriller of the early '50s, which is simply a sub-genre of the "police procedural" (e.g., "Dragnet").So, what "Undertaker" is really spoofing here is the police procedural.So the indirect progenitor of the slasher film is - Jack Webb's "Dragnet". That's a little unsettling, but true.At any rate, I'm not a big fan of slasher films, and I only watched this film a second time because it is, so clearly, an historical oddity. And it's real weird that directors like Welles and Webb (who have nothing else in common but this) should, in trying to explore the social significance of socio-pathic crime, point the way for audiences to enjoy such violence voyeuristically in the slasher film. That's cause for reflection.Which makes "Undertaker", if only for history's sake, a very, very weird little film.Not recommended for enjoyment, but a must-see for film-history buffs.

Built around puns and sight gags this film is a sort of treasure. Sick humor, the players do a good job. None of them are accomplished actors or actresses but that actually seems to lend itself well to the characters themselves. Some times a little inexperience comes across in a positive way when the goal is silliness anyway. No tongue in cheek here, unless you just bought a tongue sandwich at the corner dinner and are still chewing, its all straight forward slap stick. For quality of production and etc. I would compare it to "Little Shop of Horrors". Its just plain funny. Not a great flick, but not a bad one either. All of it works well enough, and certain of the scenes show an actual flair for photography and staging. Which helps make it as cool as it is.

This film does at least have pretensions of having a plot. That's about the best that can be said about it.Badly written, badly acted, badly directed, and even the video quality (at least on the example I viewed) was blurry and grainy. It looks like it was shot with a home video camera. Hell, it probably was.I'm looking for bright spots here, and I'm struggling to think of any. I guess one or two of the girl actresses weren't that awful. I guess if you like looking at either the insides of a cow or pig or a clip from a stolen surgical film, you've got that for about 5 seconds. If your sense of humor hasn't progressed beyond thinking that sawing the legs off of a girl named Sally Lamb and serving them up to customers in a diner as "leg of lamb" is totally hilarious, I guess you've got that.Otherwise, you do have what is pretty much invariably true: those who adopt brutality as a way of life almost always find that sooner or later, it takes them to a bad end.Unfortunately, this movie isn't even a good kind of bad... it's just crap.Since IMDb doesn't allow you to specify 0 for a vote, I reluctantly have to give this film a 1.