Have Rocket, Will Travel

Poster tagline: THEIR FIRST FULL LENGTH FEATURE MOTION PICTURE! ___ And I thought I’d never encounter anything worse than Abbott and Costello :o). But after the overwhelming success of the Marx Brothers, comedy troupes popped up at such a rapid pace that you couldn’t count them on the fingers of several hands. The Three Stooges were one of them. Strictly speaking, they were television “comedians”, and before this movie, they had shot almost 200 slapstick shorts and made fools of themselves on stage and screen for almost three decades. Abbott and Costello had been more successful, but the Three Stooges had one thing in common with them – they were all despairingly unfunny. Granted, audiences at the time appear to have had a different view – the movie made 12 million dollars on production costs of some $130,000, which means it was a huge success. They got away with using only two on-location exteriors. The special effects – a fire-breathing spider (as mentioned by Oktavianus) – were actually unused footage from Jack Arnold’s Tarantula, which is why they had a surprisingly decent look, and stood out as oddities among the sad pile that is the rest of this production. I must not forget about the Venusian – a robot with six tentacles that zaps the three hapless characters down to miniature size and jails them in a birdcage. You also get artificial clones for chase scenes with the real protagonists – heaps of fun, haha! (irony alert). In visual terms, this wasn’t a tragedy, and thanks to Arnold’s involuntary contribution, the special effects were also handled well, but the situational comedy of these three short-statured figures (all of them a head shorter than one of the female characters) was pathetic and infantile. (30.03.2020)