@Ardashir
I’m interested, I want to see these trainwreck.
You asked for it.
Everyone else, this is a review about a non-animated movie, so if that bugs you my apologies.
What happens when someone decides to cross Moe, Larry, and Curly with the Bataan Death March?
The answer is, apparently, make for a ha-ha-larious movie script that reads like someone crossed The Killing Fields with Disaster Movie!
First some explanation:
My brother belongs to the Three Stooges Fan Club, and their newsletter occasionally has some, well, unique treasures that individual members have unearthed. One such is a film idea written back in 1970 for Moe, Larry (Emil Sitka by this point, as Larry Fine was permanently out due to a stroke) and Curly Joe (DeRita). It never got made, and if you read this you’ll be thankful for that.
The title was originally Make Mine Manila, but got changed to Make Love Not War. It starts with the boys locked in a concentration camp in Central Luzon by the Japanese (and how did three guys in their 70’s survive the Bataan Death March, anyway?). The Stooges seek to escape along with a local resistance leader named Raul. When their first effort leads to them getting a faceful of Japanese feces from their guard, Sergeant Tomadatsu (they dug their way up into the latrine by mistake), their next effort lands them in the women’s quarters where they encounter the love interest for the film, an interned American named Christine who immediately falls for Raul. The boys hear the Japanese coming and hide, with Larry diving into a skirt. In strolls the drunken Sergeant Tomadatsu, who takes a shine to Larry.
TOMADATSU: “Herro, pretty American! You know what ‘comfort woman’ means?”
LARRY: “No, and I don’t wanna!”
Tomadatsu convinces Larry to surrender “her” virtue with the aid of a pistol leveled at Larry’s head. Larry returns to his pals later, exhausted and sore, to say, “I tried to explain. But he wouldn’t listen. He just went ahead and did it!” Moe beats Larry up for being an unwed mother. Ah, wartime rape, always good for a laugh! D:
Anyway, the Stooges, Christine, and Raul escape camp with the aid of some smuggled fireworks, courtesy of Raul’s pretty cousin Anita. The boys enter a barrio to hide out, where they mistakenly get engaged to Raul’s other three cousins, who are total hags. They are stuck with working like slaves to take care of the trio of husband-hungry harpies and their bolo (knife)-toting father. But it’s not all bad: the boys get to attend a wake with their future father-in-law. The booze flows freely and hilarity ensues, ending with the sidesplitting scene of Moe cuddling in bed with the corpse. So someone was doing a necrophilia comedy routine long before Vinny Mac gave us Katie Vick.
Meanwhile, Raul is kept busy killing Japanese soldiers a whole patrol at a time until he gets wounded, at which point his bloodstained manliness awakens the fires of love in Christine. Raul can no longer lead the guerrillas himself, so he has to call upon the Stooges to help him. This leads to truly comic scenes of the boys helping to blow up armories and kill unwary Japanese sentries (remember when the Stooges just conked bad guys on the head?). Their raiding angers the Japanese garrison commander, who leads the troops into Raul’s barrio to get some practice for the upcoming Sack of Manila. Raul and Anita and their uncle get taken prisoner and are threatened with decapitation. The Stooges lead the guerrillas to the rescue. Many Japanese are slain, but Raul’s uncle gets hacked to death. Woops! Oh yes, Raul and Christine get taken prisoner. Now it’s up to the Stooges and the guerrillas to save everyone!
The boys and their guerrillas sneak up on the Japanese camp, disguised as scarecrows. Things get hairy when that fun-loving alcoholic Sergeant Tomadatsu shows up with a patrol. Most of his men get clobbered with clubs by the boys. The potted Japanese sergeant wonders about this, but decides to work off his drunk by using the scarecrows for target practice. Fortunately, he shoots the real scarecrows and runs out of ammo before getting to the boys. So the Sergeant decides to practice his head-lopping skills on the scarecrows with his katana instead! (“Ah, this reminds me of the march to Nanking. Just me and the boys, trying out our swords on Chinese peasants…”) The Stooges keep ducking away from Tomadatsu’s swings until Larry belts Tomadatsu with a club. Then in a truly cheery scene the Filipino guerrillas whip out their knives and stab the defenseless Japanese to death.
We go back to the prison camp. Raul and Christine are coming up for their turn on the chopping block when the Stooges show up dressed as Japanese soldiers. They and the guerrillas battle it out with the soldiers, with the Stooges engaging in their usual wacky antics while men die horribly all around them. You know, the whole pie-tossing and eye-gouging seems somehow less amusing when people are being bayoneted and machine-gunned all around the Stooges. Of course the boys save the day, Christine and Raul get together, the Philippines are liberated, and everyone lives happily ever after.
Except for all the Japanese and about half the Filipinos, of course, because they’re dead.
The movie was supposed to have been shot on location in the Philippines, with the Philippine government providing some of the money, but for some reason after reading the script they didn’t feel like it. One can only wonder why. Also, Emil Sitka apparently acted like such a prima donna when the boys met the hoped-for backers that the backers left in disgust.
For that matter, one wonders what Moe thought when he was shown this script, which was written by his own grandson Jeffrey Maurer, who wrote the scripts for almost every OTHER Three Stooges movie, all of them thankfully lacking in wartime atrocities with a laugh track. I wonder – why did he hate his grandfather this much?
