Moonshine Mountain

Moonshine Mountain (1964)

1/2 (out of 4)

Country music superstar Doug Martin (Chuck Scott) returns to his backwoods town where he gets back into good favor with the local rednecks but soon a greedy and dirty sheriff tries to push his weight on them.

MOONSHINE MOUNTAIN is a rather horrible film and it's becoming quite clear to me that director Herschell Gordon Lewis made some really awful movies. Yes, everyone including myself loves his gore pictures but man were there some bad ones surrounding them. This film clocks in at just 83 minutes but I honestly think it was the slowest movie I have ever seen. In fact, I thought the movie was nearly over and checked the time on it and realized that I was only twenty minutes in. Yes, it's that slow.

As you'd expect the performances were quite awful as was the story, the direction, the lighting, the camera-work and pretty much everything else. What was so shockingly bad about this film is the fact that the producer and filmmakers thought someone would want to watch this. The "hicksploitation" genre wasn't a very big one but at least the majority of those films offered up either nudity or some sort of fun. MOONSHINE MOUNTAIN is just one long drawn out scene after another. There aren't any laughs, no nudity, no exploitation. There's really nothing here except for a couple dumb but fun songs.

Charles Glore stars as Doug Martin, a folk singer / jerk who goes on vacation in backwoods country. He says he's looking for inspiration for his next songs. Anyway, he ends up in a nowhere burg named Stewartsville where, after some exercises in humiliation, he actually comes to like the locale and the folk, including the purty daughter (Bonnie Hinson) of amiable rube Jeb Carpenter (Jeffrey Allen, no stranger to this type of role). He must soon do battle with a crooked sheriff named Asa Potter (Gordon Oas-Heim).

This is pretty typical stuff for independent operator Herschell Gordon Lewis, one of his ventures into "hicksploitation" that doesn't depend on gore / shock value for impact. The characters may be classic stereotypes, and a great many of the performances may not be terribly slick, but this cast still gives this thing their best effort. The picture does benefit from genuine location shooting - this shore ain't shot on no newfangled Hollywood studio backlot. Good atmosphere and a couple of catchy ditties help to keep "Moonshine Mountain" in the HGL tradition.

The bad news is that there really isn't enough story here to justify 85 minutes, so we must wait through a fair amount of padding. Without graphic violence to fall back on, HGL can't keep these proceedings quite as lively as the macabre mayhem in "Two Thousand Maniacs!".

Still, it's not without its pleasures. Oas-Heim was one of the better actors to be found in the HGL oeuvre, to be sure, and he's supremely slimy 'n' creepy as the villain. As an interesting bit of trivia, he's billed under the name "Adam Sorg", which was the name of the character he'd play in the subsequent HGL gore epic, "Color Me Blood Red".

Yeah, this is not the sort of thing one seeks out if they want "quality" cinema, and even as HGL movies go, he'd done more entertaining movies before and after this one. But completists will definitely want to have some likker on hand as they sit down and soak up this Southern-fried trash.

Six out of 10.

In Herschell Gordon Lewis's hicksploitation movie Moonshine Mountain, Charles Glore plays popular folk singer Doug Martin, who travels from New York to the backwoods village of Stuartsville looking for authentic musical inspiration. There, he meets the Carpenters, a family of hillbilly moonshiners who take Doug under their wing after he impresses them with his gittar picking. Meanwhile, Sheriff Potter (Adam Sorg) and his hulking deputy Luther (Harry Hoffman) are up to no good, killing off federal agents who have been poking their noses into Stuartsville's illegal alcohol activity.

There are two main reasons for watching an H. G. Lewis movie: T&A in his nudie cuties or excessive gore in his splatter films. People don't watch his work for great performances, slick direction or brilliant writing. Moonshine Mountain has zero boobs and not much blood, but plenty of amateurish acting, weak dialogue and ham-fisted film-making, making it a real test of one's patience. It is like Two Thousand Maniacs with all of the good stuff taken out and replaced by dreadful music and songs. If that sounds like your jar of moonshine, then quaff away, but I prefer my HGL films with guts (and brains and severed limbs).

2.5/10, generously rounded up to 3 for the amusing credits.

Country and Western singer Doug Martin (Chuck Scott) grabs his "gittar" and flies down to South Carolina from New York on a journey of musical inspiration but ends up getting caught up with thieving hicks, illegal moonshine production and a sheriff who is only too happy to exploit his position, even to the point of murdering innocent people. I had never heard of this movie before, it was an extra on my blu-ray of "Two Thousand Maniacs", both directed by the Godfather of Gore, Herschel Gordon Lewis. Moonshine is not a horror film, though a couple of mutilated corpses are seen, it is what is often termed a "hicksploitation" movie. The very low budget is obvious, the acting is terrible, etc. Sadly the original negative is lost so the version that I have is pieced together from various prints, the quality at times being very poor. Doug is as dull as dishwater but some of the hicks are entertaining. There are several musical numbers throughout, I enjoyed these but the 84 minutes running time proved hard going, it felt longer. I could only recommend this to die hard fans of either HG Lewis or hixploitation completests. . The credits read "produced & directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis who ought to know better but don't", you have been warned!

Doug Martin, a "society" western-mountain singing star on television, goes back to the Carolina hills, to get some authenticity to his over-citified blandness. There he meets up with the Carpenters and the Bashams, two families who, together with Sheriff Asa Potter, own a gigantic moonshine still which keeps the local countryside soaked with "white lightning."

Watching this movie is like watching a fictional version of a Les Blank documentary. We get plenty of backwoods music and scenery, and although it is all fake, it seems almost as though it could be real. The music, at the very least, is somewhat authentic.

In Lewis' oeuvre, this is a hard one to categorize. It's not gore or exploitation or anything risqué. It's a pretty straightforward story of a big city musician in the middle of nowhere.