Teacher's Pest

This is an embarrassingly bad and unfunny short from Charley Chase's last years. While he made a lot of wonderful shorts for Hal Roach Studios, his final few years before his untimely death were spent at Columbia making shorts that ranged for enjoyable to wretched. I count this among the wretched.

When the film begins, a bunch of L'il Abner-like idiots from the hills learn that a new teacher is coming to their crappy village. However, they LOVE being ignorant and plan on driving away the new school master. Considering he's coming to live with them, this shouldn't be too hard.

The film is chock full of unfunny and nasty stereotypes about folks who might be referred to as 'Hillbillies'. If it was nasty yet funny, I could have stood all the moonshine, gunfire and ignorance jokes. But, it just wasn't funny and abounded with very broad humor--so broad even the Studio's stars, The Three Stooges, would have refused to make such a bad film!!!

Every way as good as any of the Hal Roach Charley Chase shorts, TEACHER'S PEST features Charley as a school teacher who wants to bring some "Edumacation" to the people of a hillbilly town. Charley is shot at, given a bed to sleep in that he must share with a mother pig and her piglets and finally gets to teach (!?) the gun crazy yokels. Turns out that an evil land baron wants to buy the town cause it is sitting on a rich oil reserve. The bad guy is played by perennial Columbia second banana Vernon Dent. You will also see Chester Conklin. The classroom scene alone is worth seeing this classic. When Charley asks a student what 3 minus 1 is, the student looks out the window and sees three hillbilly's sitting on a fence. He shoots one dead and proudly says "Two!". Charley plays dual roles at one point in the story and with a fake beard, shows the townspeople that Vernon is a crook. Recommended.