The Manchu Eagle Murder Caper Mystery

This movie is not a Dead End Kids reunion, although both Huntz Hall and Gabriel Dell are in it. It is instead a warped 1970s version of a film noir with utterly bizarre comic elements that hit you more with each viewing. Dell shows magnificent comic timing and utterly dry wit as the trailer park loser who is doing genetic experiments to make chickens lay colored eggs while he also pursues his private detective business. The comedy style here is a mix of some Airplane! style gags and some extremely subtle dark humor involving animal sex, incest, suicide and drugs. All tastefully handled, mind you, because it's so doggone off-the-wall, one cannot be offended. It features:

The most bizarre gunfight in movie history

A straightfaced plea for understanding for those who practice bestiality

Grandpa Walton popping pills like a madman

Barbara Harris being her brilliant self

Hall and Jackie Coogan as a bumbling cop duo

Some of the worst lighting you'll ever see

This movie is extremely hard to find, but should you come across it, I implore you to give it a look and see comedy ahead of its time. Dell, who co-produced and wrote proves he was the Dead End Kid with the most talent. He really should have been in more movies like this in his adult life.

Gabriel Dell is the owner of a chicken hatchery who wants to be a private eye. When a local man is killed by an arrow, he is hired by the widow to investigate.

It's a burlesque of hard-boiled mysteries, co-written by Dell and director Dean Hargrove. Dell wanders around, self-narrating, looking for clues, amidst the locals, all of whom are eccentrics: nymphomaniacal widows, pill-popping doctors, fake psychics, capped by a shootout in which he and "Big Daddy" Vincent Gardenia blast each other with shotguns, spurting blood and walking away with a band-aid over their eyebrows. It's a little too broad for the actual jokes, making it seemed far more forced, especially with a cast that includes Will Geer, Barbara Harris, Huntz Hall, Jackie Coogan, and Howard Storm.

Dean Hargrove went back to tv work after this.

Gabriel Dell and Huntz Hall, original members of the Broadway stage play Dead End (1935) and the film version two years later, reteamed as a successful nightclub comedy act in the seventies after a successful run in several film series during the 30's, 40's, and 50's which included the Dead End Kids, Little Tough Guys, The East Side Kids, and The Bowery Boys. This "reunion" film died at the box office and though it has moments of hilarity, I recommend it for fans of the Dead End Kids/Bowery Boys only.

Out of the vast video vortex of forgotten films every so often a movie emerges that is so outstandingly outrageous that instant "cult status" should be awarded. This is a comedy that can only be described as part Woody Allen, part Paul Bartel, and insanely funny. Starting with the animal fetish angle, implied nymphomania, a bartender who only speaks in cliches, and a chicken hatchery owner as a private eye, "The Manchu Eagle Murder Caper Mystery" bounds along with rapid fire laughs. Multiple viewings are mandatory as this is the type that gets better each time you see it. The cast plays the deadpan humor for all it's worth, although I have no idea how they kept from hysterics? Don't miss this one, it is definitely worth seeking out. - MERK

Offbeat, peculiar, funny and pretty dead-on parody of private-eye film clichès (plus, in one memorable sequence, of Sam Peckinpah-type blood-gushing shootouts). This film finds its tone, a sort of straight-faced absurdism, right from the start and sticks with it to the end; it's almost like an American Monty Python movie. Gabriel Dell has the perfect gruff voice for his plentiful pseudo-tough-guy voiceovers; Anjanette Comer is ethereal (shown through deliberately hazy filters, to boot); Nita Talbot has a VERY sexy striptease sequence; but the most amusing character is probably a bartender who speaks exlusively in epigrams. *** out of 4.