Jalopy

Jalopy (1953)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Weak entry in the Bowery Boys series has Slip (Leo Gorcey) pretending to be a race car driver but their jalopy isn't going to win them any races. In steps a nutty scientist and Sach (Huntz Hall) who accidentally create a potion that allows their car to fly but soon crooked men are after the formula. It's too bad Sach didn't try to come up with some sort of original formula for this film to follow because this twenty-ninth film is pretty much dead on arrival and never picks up any steam. Once again we're treated to an incredibly boring story that has the boy discovering something that bad people want and sure enough the bad people come looking for it. Towards the end of the film we're greeted with a nearly twenty-minute sequence where nothing happens except for the bad guys to show up and try to force the boys into giving them the formula. This entire sequence doesn't contain a single laugh and it seems as if everything was just being made up as they went along. It's poorly directed, the acting is poor and you can't even see any attempt at them trying to be fresh. It really seems as if everyone involved wished to be somewhere else and they were just flying through the production to get the film in theaters. Even worse is the fact that Gorcey has pretty much disappeared in terms of entertainment. The previous few films had him doing less and less but here he just seems completely out of it and never really seems to be in the mix of things. Hall is pretty much himself but the screenplay does him no justice including a horrible sequence where the idiot Sach walk onto a racetrack and being walking around with all the cars speeding around him. All the films in this series were "B" movies but this one here seems a lot cheaper than any of the previous ones. I'm not sure why they decided to cut the budgets or if this trend will continue but hopefully things pick up.