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.…

In 1938, the musical revue Hellzapoppin' opened its doors to the unsuspecting masses, running on Broadway for three years before going on the road intermittently throughout the next decade. The show was mainly a free-form, anything-goes event where cast members would go into the audience to mess with them, and any semblance of a plot was non-existent as it traversed through an array of madcap comedy sketches, always updating itself for topical reasons and to make sure repeat members never got the same show twice. Such inspired lunacy worked, running for around 1400 performances, and it was decided the show would go to Hollywood to be one of them big pitcher movies. So how the hell do you translate something…

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…

Begins as a throw-every-joke-you-can-as-fast-as-you-can chaotic show full of random gags, non-sequiturs, and slapstick, with lots of 4th-wall-braking, and then moves into a MST3K style thing, and finally settles down to a real story line. Of sorts.

Opens in a sort of Hell with devils everywhere, when a cab comes rolling and out fall Olsen and Johnson, one of them says, "This is the first time a taxi driver ever went exactly where I told 'im." There are several things that must have given the Hays office migraines. Then they are talking to a director about putting their vaudeville show on film. He is showing them on a screen the story, but they are narrating what's going on, like a MST3K…

In 1938, the musical revue Hellzapoppin' opened its doors to the unsuspecting masses, running on Broadway for three years before going on the road intermittently throughout the next decade. The show was mainly a free-form, anything-goes event where cast members would go into the audience to mess with them, and any semblance of a plot was non-existent as it traversed through an array of madcap comedy sketches, always updating itself for topical reasons and to make sure repeat members never got the same show twice. Such inspired lunacy worked, running for around 1400 performances, and it was decided the show would go to Hollywood to be one of them big pitcher movies. So how the hell do you translate something…