Moonshine Mountain

Plot synopsis:
Doug Martin is a successful country-western singer who returns to his rural North Carolina home town of Stuartsville with the hope of restoring a country twang to his "citified" voice. During his drive from the airport to the town, Doug encounters hillbillies at the local general store where one of them, Raf, steals his wallet and suit jacket, but leaves behind his guitar and luggage... and car since Raf cannot drive.Doug checks into the local Stuartsville Hotel and calls his manager to wire money to him while he decides to stay for two weeks. The next day, while wondering along a dirt road, Doug passes by a dilapidated house where he meets the redneck hillbilly family the Carpenters, led by the shotgun-toting Jeb, whom Raf is Jeb's nephew. Hearing about Raf's robbing Doug the previous day, Jeb orders Raf to return Doug's wallet and what money he has left, but lets Raf keep Doug's suit jacket. Doug quickly bonds with the partly inbred family and sings a song for them to show off his talent. Doug also meets the Carpenters neighbors and rivals, the Bashamas, who run a moonshine distillery right in their backyard which supplies the surrounding areas with moonshine whisky which is called White Lighting.After having dinner with the Carpenters and Bashamas which are "grits and greens" Doug accompanys them to a ho-down and folk-singing party where he meets a few more locals, including the local redneck sheriff Asa Potter, who is in league with the Carpenters and Bashamas in helping them run their moonshine for a small profit as well as keeping them in line.Doug begins flirting with Laura Carpenter, Jeb's eldest daughter whom is a college student home on vacation. Doug's snobish New York fiancee Della, arrives in Stuartsville a few days later and quickly becomes jealous over Doug's bonding with the rednecks just to get his "country flavor" back. Jealous of Doug's latest love interest, Della decides to leave for New York, but on Della's way to the local airport, Sheriff Potter stops her and forces her to follow him to a secluded pond. When she laughs at his clumsy advances on her, the sheriff pulls out his gun and shoots her dead.Aided by the ape-like inbred Luther Basham, Potter then murders two federal agents who arrive to try to close down the still. The murderous sheriff then disposes of their bodies by throwing them into the bubbling still, which has at least three more dead bodies in.Doug soon discovers the sheriff's evil deeds when he and Laura see Potter and Luther in the area and find one of Della's shoes on the dirt road leading to the unmarked grave site where Potter has buried her. Doug asks both family heads, Jeb Carpenter and Ed Basham, to put aside their differences and team up to help him capture the sheriff and turn him over the federal authorities.At the climax, Potter decides to kill everyone in the community, and he convinces the simpleton Luther to plant dynamite at the still to blow it up and lure the families close to do it. But Luther bungles the job and Potter is forced to shoot and kill Luther to save his own life. Mary Lou Carpenter, Laura's inbred, retarded sister and whom Potter once raped earlier, arrives when she learns about what is happening and finally kills the evil sheriff with an ax in the back, just as the still, laced with dynamite, explodes.In the end, after marrying Laura, Doug returns to New York City with his new bride to resume his musical career, while the two redneck families, the Carpenters and the Bashams, begin to make plans to rebuild the still.

Tags: murder

Review:
An unforgettable experience!.
My brother and I first saw Moonshine Mountain 35 years ago.
My mother had dropped us kids off to see a "good" movie.
After looking at the pictures in the entrance, we decided to go to the B theater and see Moonshine Mountain.
What a treat!
The characters were great..the scenery great..the music outstanding.
We still talk about the girl who sang "Go Tell Aunt Rhody." So what if it was technically lacking?
For us poor country kids, who tired of movies of city antics in places we would never know, this movie said it all.I would gladly give my eye teeth to get a copy of that movie today.
It developed an addiction for alternative movies from which I hope never to recover..
A Rather Awful Movie.
Moonshine Mountain (1964) 1/2 (out of 4) Country music superstar Doug Martin (Chuck Scott) returns to his backwoods town where he gets back into good favor with the local rednecks but soon a greedy and dirty sheriff tries to push his weight on them.MOONSHINE MOUNTAIN is a rather horrible film and it's becoming quite clear to me that director Herschell Gordon Lewis made some really awful movies.
Yes, everyone including myself loves his gore pictures but man were there some bad ones surrounding them.
This film clocks in at just 83 minutes but I honestly think it was the slowest movie I have ever seen.
In fact, I thought the movie was nearly over and checked the time on it and realized that I was only twenty minutes in.
Yes, it's that slow.As you'd expect the performances were quite awful as was the story, the direction, the lighting, the camera-work and pretty much everything else.
What was so shockingly bad about this film is the fact that the producer and filmmakers thought someone would want to watch this.
The "hicksploitation" genre wasn't a very big one but at least the majority of those films offered up either nudity or some sort of fun.
MOONSHINE MOUNTAIN is just one long drawn out scene after another.
There aren't any laughs, no nudity, no exploitation.
There's really nothing here except for a couple dumb but fun songs..
Hixploitation Heaven.
Welcome to Moonshine Mountain, the coolest thing Herschell Gordon Lewis ever did that didn't involve gore, and even if it did, it wouldn't matter because this light-hearted Carolina exploitation is just fine the way it is.
Moonshine Mountain tells the story of a country singer named Doug Martin.
Doug is a soft, city boy, so he figures his lyrics, in the future, might mean something if he lives in the hills for a spell.
It appears as if all Herschell knows about southerners is what he's seen on The Beverly Hillbillies, because Doug's interactions with some of these people is just classic After settling in "The Hotel", Doug stumbles upon a nice, drunk family, the Carpenters, to hang with and to sing with, and to, hell yeah, drink with.
So, Bring on the fire water!!
Moonshine Mountain is packed with backwoods such tomfoolery as Barn dances, hangovers, rapes, murders, and you know it!!
Hillbilly music.
What Moonshine Mountain really has going for it, above all, is good ol' Jefferey Allen, the Mayor from 2,000 Maniacs, that guy is awesome, he really knows how to throw himself into a role, or maybe he just is that guy.
Moonshine Mountain also includes Adam Sorg, the killer from Color Me Blood Red, this time he plays the sheriff.
Sorg is much better in the other one, although, Moonshine Mountain is much more entertaining, and an all around better movie.
Other than 2,000 Maniacs, this might be Herschell's finest work.
if for some reason, you end up hating Moonshine Mountain, all I can say is, try out How to make a doll, that might be closer to what your looking for.
If you have an appreciation for the south, as well as low-budget cinema, you just might take a liking to this Hixploitation gem.
Now, Somebody pass the Grey Goose.
I done found me a good 'un..
Charles Glore stars as Doug Martin, a folk singer / jerk who goes on vacation in backwoods country.
He says he's looking for inspiration for his next songs.
Anyway, he ends up in a nowhere burg named Stewartsville where, after some exercises in humiliation, he actually comes to like the locale and the folk, including the purty daughter (Bonnie Hinson) of amiable rube Jeb Carpenter (Jeffrey Allen, no stranger to this type of role).
He must soon do battle with a crooked sheriff named Asa Potter (Gordon Oas-Heim).This is pretty typical stuff for independent operator Herschell Gordon Lewis, one of his ventures into "hicksploitation" that doesn't depend on gore / shock value for impact.
The characters may be classic stereotypes, and a great many of the performances may not be terribly slick, but this cast still gives this thing their best effort.
The picture does benefit from genuine location shooting - this shore ain't shot on no newfangled Hollywood studio backlot.
Good atmosphere and a couple of catchy ditties help to keep "Moonshine Mountain" in the HGL tradition.The bad news is that there really isn't enough story here to justify 85 minutes, so we must wait through a fair amount of padding.
Without graphic violence to fall back on, HGL can't keep these proceedings quite as lively as the macabre mayhem in "Two Thousand Maniacs!".Still, it's not without its pleasures.
Oas-Heim was one of the better actors to be found in the HGL oeuvre, to be sure, and he's supremely slimy 'n' creepy as the villain.
As an interesting bit of trivia, he's billed under the name "Adam Sorg", which was the name of the character he'd play in the subsequent HGL gore epic, "Color Me Blood Red".Yeah, this is not the sort of thing one seeks out if they want "quality" cinema, and even as HGL movies go, he'd done more entertaining movies before and after this one.
But completists will definitely want to have some likker on hand as they sit down and soak up this Southern-fried trash.Six out of 10..
A Nice Moonshine Movie.
Doug Martin, a "society" western-mountain singing star on television, goes back to the Carolina hills, to get some authenticity to his over-citified blandness.
There he meets up with the Carpenters and the Bashams, two families who, together with Sheriff Asa Potter, own a gigantic moonshine still which keeps the local countryside soaked with "white lightning." Watching this movie is like watching a fictional version of a Les Blank documentary.
We get plenty of backwoods music and scenery, and although it is all fake, it seems almost as though it could be real.
The music, at the very least, is somewhat authentic.In Lewis' oeuvre, this is a hard one to categorize.
It's not gore or exploitation or anything risqué.
It's a pretty straightforward story of a big city musician in the middle of nowhere..
loved the movie.
I saw this movie in Morehead City, NC when it came out and would love to see it again.
It is a thoroughly enjoyable low B movie.
The world needs this one on DVD.
Compared to many of the A movies coming out the past few years this one shines.
There was some really good humor in it.
I remember only bits and pieces of it, such as the idiot drooling blonde sitting on the log who had a great voice, the stereotyped moonshiners and a body in the moonshine vat.
The big city singer going into the mountains to collect music is the basic plot but it soon extends well past that.
I do remember laughing my head off when watching this one.
I'm now 40+ years older and wonder how I'd react to it today..
That Good Ol' Mountain Madness.
**POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD**Country singer Chuck Scott goes down to the Carolinas to research the origins of folk music.
He meets such local luminaries as the Carpenter family, the Basham family, and Adam (COLOR ME BLOOD RED) Sorg as a psychotic, rape-happy sheriff.
Within 15 minutes, Scott and the Carpenter family treat us to a rousing rendition of that chart-busting coast-to-coast hit "Go Tell Aunt Rhody."  Wretched as the song is, the Carpenters sing it fairly well despite the absence of music schools in the area, not to mention their notable shortage of teeth.
The lyrics to the other songs except "I Love That White Lightning" are unintelligible, which may be just as well.
Scott goes on to partake of the local vittles, romance one of the local wimmen and of course run up against the local corn likker trade.
The hill folk own, and fight over, "The World's Biggest Still" which looks like the world's biggest carnival dunk tank.
Sheriff Sorg murders revenooers and dumps their corpses into the still.
When director Lewis saw how many kids were attending his premiere of MOONSHINE MOUNTAIN he went into the projection booth and cut out some other gruesome bits that have never been reinstated.
I'll never forgive him for that.
Comedy fans can enjoy the appearance and antics of Jeffrey Allen, Ben Moore and Mark Douglas (leftovers from 2000 MANIACS) and Pat Patterson, future director of DR.
GORE.
One video dealer states that in his version, "the print is jumpy, the color is washed out and the sound is bad."  The scary thing is, MOONSHINE MOUNTAIN probably looked that way when it first hit the drive-ins.