510-The Painted Hills

Film Year:  1951
Genre:  Western, Drama
Director:  Harold F. Kress
Starring:  Lassie, Paul Kelly, Bruce Cowling, Gary Gray
MST Season:  5
Featured Short:  "Body Care and Grooming"

The Short

Does one hear a condescending narrator?  If you hear the sound of image shaming that means you shall be filmed bathing, dressing, and grooming one’s self in order to fit in with social norms and land yourself a husband.  And thus is the tale of Body Care and Grooming, the short that desires you to look and smell your best.

Almost something of a companion short to Keeping Clean and Neat, this one targets college age viewers as opposed to children.  As a result, it tries to get a bit more technical with bodily functions and appeals to one’s libido by making the claim that one will never get laid if they look a mess.  The short is a bit self-explanatory, though one must wonder how bad college campuses got if they needed to spread the word about bathing properly.

The Movie

“Lassie’s back and she’s PISSED!”

The Painted Hills is the seventh “Lassie” film, and the last made before the popular canine was turned into a long running television series.  Technically the film isn’t even a Lassie movie, since it’s based on an unrelated novel called “Shep and the Painted Hills” and the collie is playing a male dog named Shep as opposed to Lassie.  But since it’s the same dog from Lassie Come Home, of course it makes sense to cash in on the Lassie popularity.

The Painted Hills follows a prospector named Jonathan and his pet collie Shep, who have finally struck gold.  Jonathan’s greedy partner kills him in an attempt to keep the gold all to himself, and tries to kill Shep and little boy Tommy (NOT TIMMY AND NO HE DIDN’T FALL DOWN A WELL) to hide his secret.  But the vengeful Shep tastes blood and vows vengeance.

There’s a quite simple idea (or cliché) that we all expect a Lassie movie to be, and The Painted Hills is quite a bit bleaker and angrier story than the Lassie we all know and love.  But The Painted Hills treats “Lassie” (or Pal, as the dog was known on set) as an actor playing a role as opposed to a character.  I assume Lassie thought it was time to try something different and see if the crowd responded, like Charlie Chaplin and A Woman of Paris.

To judge The Painted Hills as its own movie it’s obviously a skilled production.  There’s lush frontier landscape and mountaintops that make for nice scenery, the story is somewhat interesting, and Lassie is still a wonderful performer as well.  But the characters are bland and the whole affair is very vanilla, and as a result the movie doesn’t hold attention very well.  What the movie does well makes it hard to dislike, it’s just not a movie worth writing home about either.

The Episode

The riffing highlight of the episode is the short, which is a goody offering with a shaming narrator bossing people around.  Joel and the bots aren’t afraid to get messy, as opposed to the short which is about cleaning up.  The love to pick apart the exaggerated examples and poke at the anal retentiveness, as well as just playing with the production values in general.  They pretty much nail the tone as the short finishes with “the end of the perfect day,” to which Joel points out “An entire day spent grooming.”

When Joel and the bots find the movie at a far different pace, they at the very least keep their riff flow steady.  Ultimately the issue I’m having with this episode is that while they liven the pace of the film, it’s just enough to turn it from a slow crawl into a leisurely walk of a film.  There are many moments in the riffing that are amusing, but it’s hard to not be a bit bored.  Not entirely helping is the “Pile-On Pete” running gag, as the boys mishear the name Pilot Pete and run with it.  I didn’t really laugh the first time, and it didn’t ripen with age.  Faring a little better is the riffers giving Lassie a craving for “Snausages!”  The riffing also grows darker as the film goes on, as death and murder start becoming more in the forefront of the story.

The host segments are mostly pretty good, with my favorite being the final moral debate of whether or not Lassie is a murderer.  Also featured is another debate on whether the girl in the short looks better messy or neat, a “lesson” on Rutherford B. Hayes, and a discussion on how much the “gold” robot Crow is worth.  The Invention Exchange amuses with the TalkBack tape recorder and the Cholester-Do-All, the latter of which is a great bit in which Dr. Forrester uses Frank’s hard-pumping, unhealthy heart to power Deep 13.

There’s a lot of funny in this episode, but truth be told it kind of falls in the middle of “average” and “good.”  I don’t give half ratings, because the older I get the more I find them to be a cheat, so I’m forced to round to the bottom on this one.  It’s okay, but it could be better.

Average

The DVD

Feel the wrath of Lassie in Shout Factory’s Volume XXXI:  Turkey Day Collection, with a great standard definition transfer and swell audio.

In this Turkey Day Marathon celebratory collection, Painted Hills may be the Turkey Day-iest disc of the bunch, as it wrangles up bumpers from three separate Turkey Days from Comedy Central.  If you are eager for more Trace and Frank as the Mads, this is the disc for you.  A lot of the Turkey Day stuff is more moments with our evil overlords (-wannabes).  While it should be noted that the 1995 marathon was previously released on the Night of the Blood Beast disc of Volume XVI, but they are repeated here (with Night of the Blood Beast segments thrown in for good measure).  So I suppose the real stars of this disc are the bumpers for 1992 and 1993, the former featuring Dr. Forrester trying to take over the world with the Turkey Day Marathon while Frank entertains guests and tries to get Dr. F to join in the festivities, while the latter features Dr. Forrester force feeding Frank a Turkey for every episode shown.  The best segments however are the 1995 ones, which feature Forrester trying to impress his mother while entertaining many guests that Frank invited before dying in Sampson vs. the Vampire Women.  These segments are a bit more clever and playful than the others with their interlocking story, while the ’91 segments are delightful but focus more on the marathon itself and the ’92 segments are brief and single-gag.

One thing that should be noted is that other than the ’95 segments, the bumpers are all in rough condition.  I suspect they were mastered from fan copies, but if they were masters from Best Brains then they took really lousy care of them.  Also a bit of an elephant in the room are segments that are [i]not[/i] here, which include 1993 bumpers of an actual MSTie party and 1994 bumpers hosted by Adam West (Zombie Nightmare) and featuring Robert Vaughn (Teenage Caveman), Beverly Garland (It Conquered the World, Swamp Diamonds, Gunslinger) and Mamie Van Doren (Untamed Youth, Girls Town).  While these segments are probably in lesser demand, it would have been nice to include them for completist sake.  However, I’m willing to let this slide since the bumpers were made by Comedy Central and not Best Brains and Shout Factory likely would have had to have gone through different channels to obtain rights to them.

The missing bumpers in question can be seen on Youtube.

1993

1994

One can also claim that Shout didn’t seem fit to include Turkey Day bumpers that they had filmed themselves for their streaming Turkey Days.  While it would have been nice to have them, since these were filmed outside of the series being on the air, I don’t entirely see them as a requirement.

Rounding out the disc, like all the episodes on Volume XXXI, The Painted Hills comes with its own custom made Turkey Day intro featuring Joel, while Servo and Crow (briefly voiced by Josh and Trace) translate dog barks.

The short, Body Care and Grooming, was also featured on Rhino’s Shorts Volume 1 compilation which was released in their Volume 2 collection.  The only extra was an introduction by Tom Servo.  Shout Factory also released this set featuring the short and said introduction.