Country western singers Woody Wetherby (Ferlin Husky) and Boots Malone (Joi Lansing) along with their business manager Jeepers (Don Bowman) are heading for the jamboree in Nashville. While driving down the road they end up in the middle of a shootout between spies and cops. Once the road is clear they continue on their way.
They then roll up to a gas station in a small, abandoned town called Sleepy Junction. The attendant tells them that everyone in town moved to Acme City since there is a missile plant there and everyone now works at the plant. They ask the gas station attendant if there is a motel or boarding house around. He tells them that there isn’t but there is the abandoned Beauregard mansion down the road where they can stay. A rainstorm begins to brew and since they can’t put the top up on their convertible they decide to stay at the mansion.
In the basement of the mansion is a ring of spies trying to steal a secret formula from the top-secret files of the Acme City Development Center. The head of the ring is Madame Wong (Linda Ho). Her minions are Dr. Himmil (John Carradine), Gregor (Basil Rathbone), Maximillian (Lon Chaney Jr.) and a gorilla named Anatole (George Barrows). They keep up the haunted house ruse by staging some standard haunted house sights and sounds and monitor everything on an array of closed-circuit television monitors.
On the case hunting for the spies is Jim Meadows (Richard Webb), an agent from M-O-T-H-E-R or Master Organization To Halt Enemy Resistance. He traces the ring to the mansion. Woody, Boots and Jeepers end up in between the spies and the agent from MOTHER. Boots is kidnapped by Anatole and gets accused of being an agent for MOTHER.
“Hillbillys in a Haunted House” was released in 1967 and was directed by Jean Yarbrough. It is an American musical comedy horror film and is a sequel to “The Las Vegas Hillbillies” 1966 but with Joi Lansing replacing Mamie Van Doren as the character Boots Malone.
The movie is basically an episode of “Hee Haw” interrupted now and then by spies and a gorilla. This one is for Country Western fans and Rathbone, Chaney or Carradine completists as well as fans of gorillasploitation. For everyone else it will be pretty much a horrible movie and not a horror movie. It starts with a kitschy song and ends with a concert in Nashville with a canned audience. The last fifteen minutes of the movie are people singing Country Western songs. All together there are about fourteen songs in the movie. It’s like someone spliced together two different movies. The only other feature is some eye candy for the guys in the form of blonde bombshell Joi Lansing.