'SHACK OUT ON 101'.......BURGERS, FRIES....'N COMMIE SPIES.....

Shack Out On 101 (1955)   What a gem.  What a treasure dug up from the landfill of 1950's Red Scare Hollywood........

            Side splittingly funny (sometimes even intentionally), this glorious, poverty-budgeted drama-thriller begs for a straight-jacket to be wrapped around it......

             Boys and girls, they don't come any crazier than this one........just feast your eyes, open your ears to its snappy, loony bin dialogue and dive head first into the madness.....

             Hot to trot and cute as a button, sexy waitress Kotty (Terry Moore) toils away at a decrepit diner stuck on the California coast highway. It's a busy life for our Kotty, carrying on a torrid affair with  the 'Professor',  an atomic scientist (Frank Lovejoy) and fending off the non-stop groping lust of the diner's stupid, leering, aggressively creepy cook......known to one and all as simply 'Slob'. (Lee Marvin)

             Meanwhile, the joint's cranky owner George (Keenen Wynn) keeps up a steady barrage of withering insults aimed at whoever's in his vicinity.....(mostly the sleazy Slob......sample exchange: Slob: "I have a mind to drop these dishes...." George: "You have a mind?")

             Little does anyone know.....(in fact, that's a good description of everyone in this movie)...that the obnoxious, seemingly dense Slob is the leader of a communist spy ring, buying atomic secrets from scientists who work nearby the diner.......

            In fact, the small cast of characters that appear to make up the diner's entire clientele turn out to be either commie spies or undercover Feds out to catch them. 

             Filmed almost in its entirety in the single set of the diner, the film resembles an adaptation of some demented, one-act Off Off Broadway play that closed after one performance.  (If only Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder had picked this script to produce, they would have gotten away clean....)

           And for those who savor cinematic one-of-a-kind wonders oblivious to their own awfulness, this film is the holy grail.....

           So many priceless moments.......Lovejoy necks with Moore while quizzing her on Constitutional Amendments........Marvin and fellow spy Len Lesser enjoy pummeling each other while playing tug of war with a towel stretched between their teeth.......and best of all, Marvin and Wynn's weight lifting contest, followed by a heated dispute over which one of them has the best muscled legs.......(all this occurring amidst even nuttier moments too numerous to mention....)

            1950's Hollywood studios, terrified and cowed by Senator Joe McCarthy and HUAC, pumped out any number of anti-communist movies to prove their patriotism....("Invasion USA", "Red Planet Mars", "My Son John")........but as far as the BQ is concerned, for sheer unhinged bravado, none of them come close to the sheer nutball nirvana of "Shack Out On 101"........

            In its own special way, easily a 5 star (*****) classic......the definitive FIND OF FINDS.