Burl reviews The Ghost and Mr. Chicken! (1966)

 

Ha ha and buck-buck-buck, it’s Burl, here to review the latest in chicken terror! No, I’m not reviewing Poultrygeist, but instead an early entry in the unofficial series of Don Knotts pictures featuring his legendary Nervous Man creation! Yes, the picture under the Burloscope today is none other than The Ghost and Mr. Chicken!

It comes from the director of Ski Party, Alan Rafkin, and tells the tale of a small-town typesetter named Luther Heggs and his adventures in a haunted house! Luther wants nothing more than to become a real newspaper reporter, but repeatedly queers his chances thanks to a propensity for hysterical overreaction! Yes, like so many Knotts characters, who usually differ only in name and occupation, Luther suffers from an acute case of novocentrosis, and how can he ever report on, say, a murder case, or especially on a ghost case, whilst in the grip of such a condition?

Ha ha, he can’t! He has enough trouble joining the local prettygirl for lunch, and he’s forever getting bamboozled by Ollie, a reporter who lives in the same rooming house as Luther and is always making fun of him! But the old janitor who works at the paper prods Luther to take on the story of the old Simmons place, a house assumed to be haunted because of a garden shears murder and attendant defenestration, which took place there lo these twenty years past! The sound of disembodied hands playing a terrific Vic Mizzy tune wafts out from the organ loft - organ lofts being a feature rarely included in new homes built these days, ha ha! - on the reg, and the whole town assumes this uncanny serenade to be the work of old, dead, Mr. Simmons!

Well, pretty soon Luther’s nervousness, already at such a level that it’s a wonder his eyeballs remain in his head, is jacked up to nuclear levels, because he agrees to spend the night in the murder house! Ha ha, organs play, painting bleed, noises and shapes and shadows terrify poor Luther and roil his very soul, until he can take it no more and flees for his life and his sanity! This for some reason leads to a courtroom scene, which eats up valuable running time that could have been spent in the haunted house! The finale finds Luther helping to solve a crime, sort of, and saving the girl, sort of, and sort of helping to bring down the bad guy, who turns out to have been the murderer from two decades before!

Luther can barely lay a claim on being the hero of the move, and in fact Luther doesn’t do much of anything through its whole running time, ha ha! His fearful passivity is sometimes maddening, even if you’re familiar with Knotts and his Nervous Man and so know what to expect! He was a talented fellow and no mistake, and capable of surprising pathos, but unless you’re in the right mood, a little nervousness can go a long way! In the end, what can you say except "Atta boy, Luther!"

 I’ve heard that kids who saw this movie at the right age were terrified by it, but considering the brightly-lit television look and the marvelously jolly Mizzy score, I’m not sure if I believe it! It’s got lots of smalltown charm, and the same sort gallery of familiar mugs you would see in the live-action Disney movies of the decade that followed (ha ha, even Robert Cornthwaite from The Thing From Another World and Matinee is in here, playing a lawyer), but the Scooby-Doo revelation at the end is a bit of a disappointment! Still, it’s better than the Nervous Man pictures that followed, like The Reluctant Astronaut and The Shakiest Gun in the West! I’m going to give The Ghost and Mr. Chicken two organ lofts!