The Lemon Grove Kids Meet the Monsters

Positively the most memorable movie-going experience of my life. Procter's Theater in Troy, NY...probably around 1968 or 1969. My sister took me to see this movie on a Saturday...billed as including a special guest appearance by real live monsters.

I don't recall much about the first two shorts. But the last...when the Lemon Grove Kids and Cash Flagg enter into a cornfield or dense weeds...they are met by lightning crashes and a MUMMY!

At that moment...a spotlight hits the side of the Procter's stage and a guy in a Mummy suit staggers out. His arms are raised up and he heads for the aisles.

The audience flipped. I remember everybody leaping out of their seats and running down the aisles terrified. I ran too...but sister nabbed me before I could get too far. Things settled down. The mummy disappeared. And we sat back to watch the rest of the show. I have no memory of what came after.

But that memory of the mummy on the stage was indelible. I was around five or six when I saw it.

Years later in Washington, DC I came across an old video of the movie from the late great Georgetown Video Vault (this was around 1992) and I laughed it up with my wife over Lemon Grove Kids and Ray Dennis Steckler. Oh...if we only had that kind of movie experience again!

This movie holds a special place for me in my movie going experience. It was the absolutely worst movie I ever saw in my hometown theater. After more than 35 years, I can still remember walking home from the theater and thinking that this was the worst movie I had ever seen. And, yes, this was the same theater where I had seen Edward D. Wood Jr.'s "Plan Nine From Outer Space" (1959) years earlier. This movie was shown as a special event with people dressed up as monsters invading the theater during a point in the film. If there was anything good to say about this film, it would be about Cash Flagg's impersonation of Huntz Hall (I was a Bowery Boys fan). For rather obvious reasons, no other Steckler film ever played in my hometown. I have since seen worse films, but I would have to go to other cities for that torture.

Ray Dennis Steckler put together a trilogy of comic shorts modeled on the Bowery Boys series, with impressive results if you're not expecting any sort of masterpiece. In the first story, the kids, a motley bunch of toddlers and adults dressed as teenagers, head to Coleman Francis's house to do some housework. Extraterrestrials start picking them off, a green grasshopper in a flying saucers claiming the main kid, so it's up to doofy Steckler (acting as Cash Flagg) to find a way to save the day.. In the second part, the kids get a job doing housework for falling star Carolyn Brandt. Some bumbling villains kidnap her, but her sleazy agent says she's not worth the ransom. Thus it falls to Steckler once again to intervene and rescue both Brandt and her career. This episode also features a very annoying adult who spends a little too much time with the kids and sings remarkably uninspired songs about them on an acoustic guitar. Not a person I would trust with my own offspring, but Steckler probably couldn't afford high-end babysitters. In the final part of the trilogy, Steckler heads into the wrong side of town to buy some sodas on a hot afternoon, instigating a rumble. They decide to settle their differences with a cross-country race. A funny French saboteur, hired by the rival team, does their best to put the Kids' star athlete out of the – ahem – running, and somehow we're led into a startling monster attack sequence. This conclusion seals tight the possibility that Steckler was having a grand time making these shorts, possibly never intended for theatrical release. In a way, Lemon Grove Kids exists as an interesting home-movie documenting the styles and culture of the early 1960's made by a barely experienced filmmaker, who had only been in the business for a few years. Although I enjoyed this film quite a bit, I'd only show it to children I really hated. Some of the women-children boast some surprisingly sexy outfits, plus a certain amount of the humor veers toward the sophisticated. Brandt appeared in a number of Steckler's films. Steckler fans with be happy to see hero Ray Pfink in a cameo.

Most of Ray Dennis Steckler's films are so energetic that even if they aren't very good (which is usually the case), they manage to entertain on that same odd level Edward D. Wood, Jr. established a few years before. That being said, "The Lemon Grove Kids" is a surprisingly entertaining anthology (three episodes) aimed at a young audience, but I must say I found a lot of it amusing myself (and I'm 22); Steckler has a real repoire with his actors, as they bumble about in traditional Scooby-Doo fashion, as they encounter space aliens, mummies, and kidnappers (they don't show any signs of humiliation at the sheer wackiness of the material). The first episode has the Lemon Grove Kids cleaning up an eccentric old man's ("Red Zone Cuba" auter Coleman Francis!) house, only to find it's been invaded by a grasshopper alien and a Vampira look-alike (played by Carolyn Brandt!); the second episode has the Kids cleaning the mansion (also used in "The Thrill Killers") of a washed-up Hollywood starlet (Brandt again), who is accosted by a dim-witted duo looking to score a ransom; and the third (and weakest) episode has two rival gangs competing in a cross-country (but more like cross-town) marathon. In general, this is moderately entertaining stuff for kids of any age (sure beats "Barney"), and makes me wonder why Mr. Steckler didn't do more of this type of thing.

5.5/10

Born in 1965, I can't say much about this movie. I remember, as a little kid being scared silly, since there were 'live' monsters in the audience at the theater during the movie. This was the most scared I ever was at a movie.....ok, so I was probably 5 years old. E-mail me if you saw this show in the theater back then.