Both Sena and I enjoyed the Svengoolie show movie last night, “The Ghost and Mr. Chicken.”
This 1966 film directed by Alan Rifkin and starring Don Knotts as Luther Heggs, Joan Staley as Alma Parker, Liam Redmond as Kelsey, Philip Ober as Nick Simmons, and Dick Sargent as George Beckett is a horror spoof that we’ve seen before but it’s still really funny.
Luther Heggs is a typesetter for a newspaper in a little town who sort of agrees to spend the night in a haunted house where a couple of murders took place twenty years in the past which were never solved. Luther wants to be a reporter and gets his chance when Kelsey talks him into writing a filler story on the anniversary of the murders.
In fact, if not for Kelsey’s slick manipulation of the main characters including George Beckett the editor of the newspaper, a lot of the story wouldn’t take place. A big part of the action is related to bringing whoever killed the occupants of the house (who were related to Simmons) to justice.
A lot of the hilarity comes from Knott’s superb portrayal of the extremely nervous guy who does brave things despite his fears. Luther has a crush on Alma and despite his shyness, to impress her he shows her his karate moves which he has been learning entirely from a correspondence course he’s been taking for years and which has made his whole body a lethal weapon.
Luther convinces the town that he has seen supernatural events in the Simmons’ haunted mansion, which makes him a hero worthy of celebration in his honor. His bungles his acceptance speech and then gets a summons to appear in court to fight a libel charge from Nick Simmons because he doesn’t want the publicity about the haunting to interfere with his plans to demolish the house.
The trial is one of the funniest scenes in the movie, leading to a couple of witnesses inadvertently making things a bit more difficult for Luther to beat the libel charge by revealing that he has a lifelong track record of telling tall tales.
The detective part of this story involves the manipulation of Kelsey, the motive of Simmons to demolish the house, and the perseverance of Luther to confront his terror while confronting the mystery of what happened twenty years previously in the Simmons’ mansion.
I have given this very funny film the highest Shrilling Chicken Rating of 5/5.
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