Saturday, February 19, 2011

Movie review – Elvis #18 - “Tickle Me” (1965) **1/2

Silly Elvis cheapie made for Allied Artists, shot entirely on the backlot – he’s a rodeo rider who winds up working at a fat farm run by, you guessed it, an elder woman (Julie Adams). It’s actually not so much a fat farm as a place for good looking women to walk around with not much on, so Elvis has a pretty good time.
This is a really dumb, silly film which I actually ended up enjoying more than I thought. There’s lots of slapstick, pleasing tunes, women in bikinis and extended comedy bits, like a fantasy sequence where Elvis imagines himself as a gunslinger in the old days. The guts of the plot doesn’t have much to do with rodeo riding, but rather one of the girls looking for some long lost gold cache and coming up against some corrupt locals – it’s just like an episode of Scooby Doo, complete with haunted house finale and it’s-old-man-Weatherby revelation that the baddie is, gasp, the sheriff. This is a movie for kids more than anyone else, but on those terms it succeeds well enough.
Jack Mullaney offers excellent comic support; as the younger romantic interest, Jocelyn Lane is extremely easy on the eye, especially as costumed here, even if she can’t act. The cast also includes Allison Hayes (like Adams, a 50s icon), Connie Gilchrist and Bill Williams, plus a bunch of starlets.

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