“I myself have heard the rattling of chains” – Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow (1959)
Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow is a frustrating, goofy, pointless mess that barely remembers to have a ghost, a dragstrip, or a hollow – and yet, I had a lot of fun while watching it, and isn’t that the truer measure of whether a movie is “good” or not?
Apparently not, if you believe most of the reviews. Dennis Schwartz claimed that, “This one stinks even for AIP,” while TV Guide called the script “deformed.” And they’re not wrong. At once mash-up and spoof of monster movies, haunted house movies, juvenile delinquincy movies, and hot rod movies – often American International’s own output in all of those genres – Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow is plotless to a degree that most experimental films never manage.
The premise seems simple enough: A Los Angeles hot rod club gets evicted from their clubhouse because they can’t pay the rent. That their clubhouse involves a cartoonish cajun cook and a band that fires off guns while they perform goes unremarked upon. Ostensibly because they are looking for new digs, they eventually wind up exploring a purportedly haunted house where they immediately throw a Halloween costume party that gets crashed by a (fake) monster and a (real) ghost.
Here’s the thing, though: Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow isn’t interested in any of that. No ghost or haunted house is even mentioned until around 40 minutes into the film’s 65-minute running time. Instead of a plot in any meaningful sense, we get an endless series of subplots. Weirder still, none of those subplots are ever resolved.
Our delightfully charming female lead has a rivalry with the unfeminine girl from a rival club (or maybe former members of the same club, I’m unclear). The rival club shows up several times a la that scene in Anchorman just to create pointless tension. All of this is apparently resolved off camera, with our lead simply saying that she doesn’t think they’ll “bother us anymore,” leading at least one Letterboxd user to assume she murdered them – which does not actually seem impossible.
Our lead, played by Jody Fair, is in trouble with the law because of a duel with her rival, and in trouble with her square of a dad who both doesn’t like her hot rodding and doesn’t like her seeing boys. “You’re approaching womanhood,” he tells her, during the most weirdly erotically charged birds-and-bees discussion you can imagine in a ’50s movie. “I’ve got news for you,” she replies, “I’ve arrived.”
The generational divide between Jody Fair’s character and her dad occupies vastly more of the film’s running time than the haunted house, and yet that subplot is dropped like a hot rock as soon as the haunted house subplot begins, and her dad is never seen again.
Even the haunted house, which is theoretically meant to solve the problem of their not having a clubhouse doesn’t really seem to do so. There’s a monster creeping around the place and a real ghost, before all is said and done, and I guess once both of those are taken care of – the monster unmasked, Scooby-Doo style, the ghost exorcised by rock ‘n’ roll music – the gang can use the haunted house as their new headquarters, but the movie barely pays any attention to any of that.
The monster is the suit from The She-Creature, a more straight-faced if no more inspired AIP creature feature from three years before, and it is worn by Paul Blaisdell, who designed that critter as well as plenty of others for AIP. When the monster is unmasked, rather any of the characters we have thus far met in the movie it is, in fact, Paul Blaisdell, playing himself, sneaking around the house in a monster suit because he is angry that AIP didn’t use him in Horrors of the Black Museum.
“I scared you to death in The Day the World End,” he snivels into the camera. “You shivered when you saw me in She-Creature. Oh the shame of it, the indignity! They didn’t use me in Horrors of the Black Museum after my years of faithful service. They just… threw me away!”
Ironically, Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow was pretty much Blaisdell’s last film, making his non sequitur motivation weirdly prophetic. The real-life ghost in the house is equally pointless, and only shows up for one scene at the very end.
What the film is really all about are gags and teen lingo and musical and dance numbers. There are countless visual gags. There’s a foul-mouthed parrot. There’s more innuendo than a bawdy limerick. The nerdy hot rodder invents a talking schlepcar powered by artificial intelligence and dry ice, apparently. There are at least four full parties, including a slumber party where the girls all watch TV that inexplicably reverses itself and employs inappropriate sound effects. There are several complete songs and lots and lots of teen dancing – and even more “ginchy” lingo. Here’s an example:
“It’s not a chop, kitten. I purr you. Why, I’m not just makin’ sound waves. Like, if you werent’ jacketed, I’d move in. ‘Cause you’re a dap. I mean a real dap!”
If that’s all Greek to you, don’t worry. Context clues will usually get you through and nothing that happens ever matters anyway.
Back to the songs for a minute; at one point one of the girls holds up a record long enough for the audience to see that it’s from American International Records – interestingly enough, a real thing. AIP launched a record label around the time the movie came out, and the songs from this film were among their first pressings.
There’s not a convenient place to fold it in, but the sexuality of this picture is something else. Even among the juvie movies of its era, its fairly tame as far as its actual content, and even progressive in the form of Jody Fair’s character, who is “more interested in hod rods than hot romances.” Sure, there’s innuendo to spare – at one point, the nerdy hot rodder wakes from a nap and tells his girl, “I dreamed I was an 18-cylinder motor. It was wonderful. You should have seen my driveshaft!”
But, like most of the rest of the movie’s qualities, its erotic energy is more vibes than actual content. The aforementioned “talk” between Jody Fair’s character and her dad is one good example, but an even better one comes from the nerdy hot rodder and his girl. The latter is played by unusually tall former Miss New York Sanita Pelkey, who had been a showgirl before going into acting. The vibe of their relationship – where she is equal parts girlfriend, mother, and dom – must be seen to be believed.
There’s even a halfhearted attempt at some sort of theme. Russ Bender plays a newspaper reporter who is doing a series of articles on hot rod culture – another subplot that is shortly forgotten. In explaining it at one point, though, he describes how “kids these days” feel like they have to grow up fast because, “They’re not sure there’ll be a tomorrow.”
It’s somehow a lot and yet not much, all at the same time. And that’s Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow in a nutshell.
“This place is loaded with ectoplasm, isn’t it?”
