The plot is simple (and for a 15 minute short, you kinda figure it has to be really): there are too many people making their way to Heaven these days (“these days” referring to the 1930s) and this decidedly disturbing rendition of Satan’s not happy about it. Not one to do his own dirty work, the artist formerly known as the prince of darkness puts his right hand man Howie Burns (har har) on the job of wrangling up some new souls… and whatever else he does with said right hand… which, if it’s anything like what I do with my right hand, isn’t pretty. In addition to dictating a letter to his hot secretary Impy (Mary Carlisle in a sadly boob-detracting but “dictation” enticingly short-skirted get-up) to St. Peter telling the bouncer at the pearly gates to keep his mitts off their clientele, Burns (har har again!) goes Earthside and intrudes on the preachings of a typically uptight Christian shyster rooting for converts like a hog on the truffle trail. Burnsie has no trouble luring a gang of would-be sinners down to the lake of fire with the promise of guns, gambling, miracle weight loss, and some of the ugliest strippers this side of the garden state. Damn it, getting people to give up their eternal souls for a pistol and a pack of playing cards was so much easier before giant screen plasma TVs, stomach stapling, and cars that cost more than houses were invented…

Descending into the fiery-unknown via giant Satanic tongue slide, everybody sits around a nightclub setting to watch another dance number, this time with a line of kickers and strutters in kinky Casshan inspired headgear doing their thing around a GIANT smoking devil head! If the rest of “The March of Time” was intended to be as elaborate as this short, it’s no wonder the producers were never able to put together the money to finish it! I don’t think I’ve seen a musical before with such elaborate set pieces!... then again, taking into consideration that the rest of the short is shot between a cheaply made “Devil’s Cabaret” barker’s stage and a very plain looking office with little more than a few fires burning outside of the windows, it’s possible that everything could have balanced out in budget terms.

Anyway, once this last dance number is done, Mr. Burns (“eeeeeeeexcellent”) tells his new group of sinners that the show's over and it’s time for everyone to separate off into their gender specific dormitories because, as Howie makes sure to note, “That’s the Hell of it”! Oye. With the exceptions of those big fancy Hell sets and the general madness involved with something like this, by the time it was over I still found myself at the odd emotional impasse. Though I wanted to see more and find out exactly what destination was in mind for this musical train wreck, the other side of my brain was relieved to see what was there finally come to a halt, especially considering the terrible dance numbers and those ghoulish looking cabaret dancers with their dead opium addicted faces and their frumpy old lady undergarments. I’m in one of those critical deadlocks from which there seems to be limited escape hatch access. It’s a one-Death God cul-de-sac from which I can only dig my out half-heartedly with a mediocre rating.

It’ll never happen, but I’d like to see this short get the Reefer Madness treatment and get turned into a big elaborate feature length musical by the people at Showtime. Again, it’ll never happen, but a god can dream, right?

I used to wonder why my deceased granddad always used to besiege me with terrible puns and bad jokes packed with more cheese than Doc Robert Atkins’s colon, but after witnessing the likes of One Frightened Night and The Devil’s Cabaret over the last few weeks, I can understand the man’s sense of humor completely: old timey Hollywood made him do it! Though Howie does take a few moments out of his schedule of tossing puns and bad jokes at us (sometimes at a rate of 4 or 5 ppm – puns per minute) to take cheap fat pops at one particularly robust female character, bemuse a sideshow fire-eater and toss innuendos at a lap riding Impy (who I’d like to do a little “innuendoing” to myself of course *wink*wink*nudge*nudge* say no more), the majority of his screen time is spent going for the Olympic record in pun hurling, making 15 minutes seem at times like well over an hour and superficially wounding the audience repeatedly.

Some people are forever altered by tragedies in their life like the death of a parent at a very early age, a daily regiment of bullying from the biggest piece of crap in the third grade, or the sweaty hands of a perpetually lonely relative that everyone else referred to as being “a little strange but otherwise harmless”. After my grandfather’s death last year, it’s only struck me today that the tragedy that shaped that man’s personality was the “komedy” of Tinsel Town’s supposed “golden age”. I don’t know, maybe while he was growing up in the ‘40s good writers, like everything else at the time, were in short supply because of the war effort. Whatever the case, I think I just saved myself years of psychiatric analysis by pinpointing the root of my abominable sense of humor: a vicious cycle of comedic abuse that was passed from my grandfather to my father and then on to me. Well, I guess the only hope for the next generation is to castrate myself right now to make absolutely sure that I never spawn a child of my own to perpetuate such groan inducing funny bone torture on…

If you need me, I’ll be in the bathroom with a pair of hedge clippers and a gallon of Bactine™. Don’t forget to lock up on your way out. Oh, and if you don't hear from me in the next 24 hours, do me a favor and send William Shatner and his "Rescue: 911" crew over to check in on me. Thanks.