For the first time in FIVE years, I’m DJ’ing
on Halloween! Downstairs in the Bamboo Room of Fontaine’s cocktail lounge in Dalston THIS Friday (as in: 31 October. Tickets available on the door. Just rock
up at the venue from about 8 or 9 pm until late; it will be fine!). After a
LONG hiatus from DJ’ing, I am nervous but excited. Campy and abrasive vintage
Halloween novelty songs are genuinely a favourite musical genre of mine at any
time of year!
BUT if you’re not London-based, you can still do the Monster
Mash, Transylvanian Twist and Werewolf Watusi from the comfort of your own home
to my sprawling, putrid festive Lobotomy Room Halloween playlist on Spotify!
It’s filled with (mostly) kitschy spook-tacular Halloween novelty songs from
the fifties and sixties! (Ensure you put it on "shuffle" for maximum
listening pleasure!).
Recently
watched: 3 Nuts in Search of a Bolt (1964). (Tagline: “The screwiest comedy of
the year!”).
Renaissance man of vintage smut Tommy Noonan (actor, comedian,
screenwriter, director and producer) followed up his witless but profitable 1963
Jayne Mansfield sex farce Promises
... Promises!with this even more witless sex farce a year
later. This time, that other Eisenhower-era blonde bombshell Mamie Van Doren
steps into Mansfield’s Spring-o-lator heels in the lead role of exotic dancer Saxie
Symbol. (Note that Noonan had the rare distinction of appearing onscreen with
Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Mansfield in Promises … Promises! and
Van Doren here).
3 Nuts is a slapdash and incoherent mess (for example, for some reason it shuttles
between black-and-white and colour), Noonan’s mugging is mind-numbingly unfunny,
but it exerts a weird fascination for
connoisseurs of bad movies. By this point, Van Doren would have been considered "washed-up"
(to quote The Simpsons, “show business is a
hideous bitch goddess”) but her 1960s
look of dark eye make-up and bouffant up-swept bubble hairdos is irresistible. While never a natural anarchic comedienne like
Mansfield, the woman possesses a genuine “je ne sais quoi.” (Also: Van Doren doesn't bare quite as much flesh as Mansfield did in Promises).
3 Nuts’ best moments are Van Doren’s opening and
closing burlesque numbers and the bathtub sequence (it’s like a retro Playboy
magazine pictorial come to life. We’re meant to believe Saxie is bathing in
beer). The cast also features ultra-campy female impersonator and actor Thomas
Craig “T C” Jones as the personal secretary of a sexy female psychiatrist (Ziva
Rodann) and he’s good fun. (Jones was also a highlight in Promises … Promises! imitating
Tallulah Bankhead and Bette Davis). For what it’s worth, Playboy magazine
called 3 Nuts“a zany comedy of Freudian tomfoolery!” Perhaps
more accurately, The San Francisco Examiner termed it “a strong candidate for the worst picture of this
or any other year.”
