Mort (Ray Dannis) is an undertaker and business is good. Mort runs the “Shady Rest funeral Parlor”. His specialty is cheating his customers. Spike (Robert Lowery) and Doc are two of Mort’s pals. They own the “Greasy Spoon Diner”. All three are homicidal maniacs. All three ride motor cycles. In order to keep their businesses going the three set out on a murderous journey to provide corpses for Mort’s funeral parlor and meat for Spike and Doc’s diner.
At random they select the home of Sally Lamb (Karen Ciral). After stabbing her they cut off her legs and leave. Mort ends up getting the rest of the body for the Shady Rest and Spike and Doc get a couple legs of Lamb, soon to be the special at the Greasy Spoon.
Harry Glass (James Westmorland, using the name Rad Fulton in the credits), is a private detective whose office is near Spike and Doc’s diner. With his secretary Miss Ann Poultry (Sally Frei) in tow he stops by the Greasy Spoon for a bite to eat. Ann insults the food, the diner, Spike and Doc. This puts her on the dinner menu. Stopping by her apartment the three men kill her and take away some body parts. The next day at the Greasy Spoon, breast of chicken is the special of the day.
Now Harry needs a new secretary. Friday (Warrene Ott) applies for the job. When she goes to get a burger from the Greasy Spoon she disappears. Doc fancies himself as a doctor and Friday mentions that she has a pain in her stomach, well; Doc has got to cut her open to see if he can fix it. She dies and now hamburger is on the menu. Eventually Friday’s twin sister Thursday (Warrene Ott) shows up looking for her.
Detective Jennings is assigned the case. All he knows so far is that there were three men on motorcycles and this is the fifth murder mutilation in the city. He doesn’t learn much more until Mort loses the license plate off his motorcycle. Harry does a little checking and finds out that Mort is pals with Spike and Doc. Things are starting to get a little sticky for the three homicidal maniacs.
“The Undertaker and His Pals” was released in 1966 and was directed by T.L.P. Swicegood. The movie is a grindhouse/slasher/comedy movie.
Supposedly the movie was a little longer and included some clips from surgeon training films. Is seems that after the original showing they were determined to be too shocking and were cut. The run time ended around 60 minutes or so, not including credits.
The humor is basically sophomoric. The blood gust and gore ditto. I’ve seen bloodier movies and I’ve seen lamer movies. The acting is bad, the plot is non-existent. It seems the plot is just highlighting one gory scene after another. Even the gore didn’t seem all that interesting. What wasn’t offsite seemed a little subdued for a slasher movie. Even the characters were thin. The women were sex hounds, the men were sociopathic killers. The detectives confused.
I hate to sound like a movie critic, but with no flow between the scenes any action was confined to whatever the sick joke was that the filmmakers were trying to get across in that scene. It reminded me more of a series of vignettes that were held together only by the same actors being in each one. That doesn’t have to be a problem since a lot of movies are episodic and are still interesting. With this one I just found it a little, well perhaps not boring but definitely uninteresting. It’s not funny and it’s not scary.
Still the film has a cult base that couldn’t care less about anything other than the blood, guts and gore and the silly humor. If that’s your kind of movie than this will get you there.