Back in the early 80's, NBC used to offer the "NBC Sunday Night Late Movie" to local affiliates. This movie series was usually either an old NBC movie-of-the-week ( I saw Michael Landon's TV movie about bet wetting there, which was actually pretty good) or a collection of busted NBC pilots. They would package 3 of these pilots up, show them one after the other, and call it a "movie".
It was obvious why NBC was dead-last in the ratings back then; these pilots were apparently the best NBC could come up with, and they almost made it on the network! Yikes!
I saw many, many terrible pilots, but "Bungle Abbey" was one of the worst. This was about a large group of elderly monks, including Gale "Mr. Mooney" Gordon and Charlie Callas, living in a monastery in California. They even had the brown hooded robes and the sandals. As I remember it, there were many jokes about stomping grapes, wine making, and Vows of Silence. The set was a large stone room with an enormous fireplace and bulky wooden doors, something you'd expect to see in a monastery in the middle ages, but not in present-day California.
I would say that the jokes in this show were as old as the monks, or as stale as the abbey wine, but that would be stooping to the level of the show itself. I would love to see this show again, simply because it was so incredibly awful in every way! LOL
