It opens with a scene of hell. Men and women are tormented for their sings, devils forge pitchforks, and an industrial vision of eternal damnation plays out... to lively, peppy music. Moments later, it shatters the fourth wall and jumps into a romantic comedy, but none of that matters. This is positively Marxist, and it has nothing to do with economics. This is concentrated absurdity. It has a bit more focus on its plot than, say, Duck Soup, but not by much. The plot is a backbone that they build lunacy onto.

It digresses wildly. It hops from song to song without reason. It sets up gags and knocks them down, and it doesn't let reality get in the way.…

For as long as I've been into old films, particularly old comedies, I've been reading about Hellzapoppin and how far ahead of it's time it was. And for some reason I've never got round to it, despite loving the Marx brothers, its most common point of comparison, I just thought it would be that bit too zany or vaudeville for me or interesting only in what it got away with.

And it kind of is, I'm not sure its the funniest thing from the period I've ever seen although it got genuinely funny performances from Mischa Auer and Hugh Herbert and I've seen a lot from them that really wasn't that great. There are some very good gags there, I…

2014's Shemp-A-Thon continues with Hellzapoppin'.

I've heard tell of this movie for many years, mostly in the context of it being used as a kind of catch-all point of comparison for any particularly anarchic metatextual comedy produced since 1941, including favorites like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Mel Brooks' movies, Space Ghost Coast to Coast, etc., so it figured I'd be very interested to finally watch this thing. Now that I have, I can't say it's funnier than any of those things, but it does have a compulsively watchable spirit that manages to be fascinating even when it's not laugh-out-loud funny - the only dead spots are the obviously (and explicitly acknowledged as) studio-mandated musical numbers and romantic storyline.…

Hellzapopin is an extremely underrated musical comedy; which makes no sense considering this is one of the funniest films ever made.
For a movie that’s made in the 40s, some of the comedy feels incredibly inventive; especially with some of the jokes that are being thrown out. The jokes come a mile a minute, to the point where if one joke fails another one would come just a few seconds later and land. I’ve heard that this movie being referred to as, anarchic comedy- which makes total sense- as the film feels frantic and chaotic, more so than your usual screwball comedy.
Trying to explain the plot is hard to say the least. It’s a film, within a film, about…