Review of Mudhoney! (1965) by Donald W — 11 Mar 2014

This is not a typical Russ Myer's sex farce. There's some nudity and simulated rape. There's an actual story in this movie. It's centered around a counry madame with two daughters with low cut dresses and is said to brew moonshine wiskey.

A drifter comes across the women and who send him to a local farm with an abusive husband and a sick old man and his niece who is married to the abusive husband. The bad guy spends more time partying with the women and drinking the moonshine than he spends at home.

It was made in the mid 1960's before the current rating system was adopted. It's in black and white because color was expensive in the 1960's and this is a very low budget movie. The story is set in the early 1930's during the depression and the end of the prohibition era.

It's a rual setting and is filmed in old abandoned farm houses. In the 1960's there were still a lot of old abandoned houses in the rual parts of the country that had been abandoned in the 1930's through 1950's.

The actors are Russ Myer's stock players. The strange part of the movie is Myer's take on religion. The preacher charater is a true holy roller that may have been in place in the 1800's but is not a 20th century minister.

He's dressed in 19th century clothes and talks a lot of jibberish in a 19th century style but he never actually quotes any Bible verses. Myer's liked to use religious charaters to turn his movies into morality plays.

That's after he has his evil character's engage in all sorts of deviant behavior. In this case he has the bad guy abuse his wife and then has him rape and murder the preacher's sister. He then kills the off the deviant charaters at the end of the movie, in this case the rapist/murderer is hung by a lynch mob and the crazy preacher who leads the lynch mob is shot by the town sheriff.