I like the Nudie Cutie, and find the dopey plots kind of fun, but this was just too dumb. Granny Good, doing a bad Jonathan Winters impersonation (or did Winters and Bob Cresse both draw the Granny/Maude Frick character from a common source? I don't know),is insufferable. Then there are the cheesy made-up monsters that are really pathetic. As a kid born in 1959, I love early 60s monsterdom, but even I have my limits. Of course also as a kid born in the 50's I love massive mammaries. This movie *does* have that, in the person of one platinum blond who manages to walk across a landing and down a staircase twice. The subtle movements of her breasts, en route, suggest that breasts, when challenged by gravity, have a mind of their own. Said generously endowed blond has a little bit of a Lorna Maitland look, except with a little too much of a pooch stomach and not quite as nice eyes though still real cute (anybody know who she is? Please pm me.) Back to ripping on the movie. The acting and especially the direction is unnecessarily bad. Just a little more work would have made this movie a keeper. E.g., one man in a business suit investigating Bare Mountain walks in and sees a topless woman sitting on a desk and calmly asks her for directions. Then, later, he walks by another topless woman and is totally surprised. The police 'work" in the movie is totally boring and is probably bad leftover vaudeville shtick, without the redeeming quality of being delivered with expert timing live on stage.

Incredible! Not necessarily in a good way either. HOUSE ON BARE MOUNTAIN is a (perhaps for the best) forgotten movie which combines some terrible comedy with a nudie cudie-style film, of which there were hundreds being made during this period (the genre is probably best exemplified by the works of Russ Meyer, H.G. Lewis, and Harrison Marks). It's certainly a one off film on which the production levels are about the same as an average Ed Wood epic. The "plot" - if you can really call it that - concerns Granny Good and her school for special girls, which is really a front for a bootlegging operation run in the cellar. An undercover girl is sent to investigate while the police close in. That's it.

Bob Cresse - a strange chap to be sure - plays the film entirely in drag as Granny Good. His character can really be seen as the logical predecessor to our own Benny Hill, and he takes great delight in delivering bad jokes and puns. The rest of the comedy seems to be taken from ancient slapstick routines, with the film being sped-up at some points. The music is incredibly cheesy and shots of a mountain-top castle are interested in order to give the film it's title.

This film may have some interest for horror fans due to the inclusion of the Wolf Man, Dracula, Frankenstein and a Ghoul, or their no-budget equivalents. The latter three are just normal guys either wearing cheap makeup or masks, although the Wolf Man has "official" makeup by a guy who worked on PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE - there's a claim to fame! Events culminate in a drunken party where the cops, monsters, and girls chase each other around. It seems even members of the public, friends, and production team were dragged in. In the end, HOUSE ON BARE MOUNTAIN simply serves as an excuse to show an endless parade of naked girls which it does at every opportunity.

You've never seen more! Let us prove it to you when the monsters meet the girls! The nudies meet the nasties! No monster ever had it so good! See Frankenstein do the twist with Miss Hollywood! The gayest girlie spree of all time! Everything's off when the horror boys meet Granny Good's girls! The biggest bevy of beauties ever laid before your eyes! For adult adults only!

Get ready for 62 minutes of sheer wildness as directed by Lee Frost and Wes Bishop. If you wonder, with scumbags - and I say that term with the utmost of respect, admiration and love - like this were at the wheel, how far away was Harry Novak? Oh, he was there. He was there.

Granny Good's School for Good Girls is really a front for girls to get naked and make booze for Granny Good, who is played by producer Bob Cresse. She also employs a werewolf named Krakow. Yes. A werewolf. And when the girls throw a party, that's when Dracula and Frankenstein's Monster show up.

Ann Perry, who plays Sally in this, was originally going to be a nun before she met her first husband Ron Myers. After starting her career in Cresse's softcore films, she went fill hardcore and started her own production company, Evolution Enterprises, in the 1970's, becomingone of the only women to write, direct, and produce her own hardcore movies. She was also the first female president of the Adult Film Association of America (AFAA).

The adult films of 1962 are incredibly odd affairs today, featuring little to no sex and mostly women taking off their clothes and doing things like reading topless. I find them incredibly charming, almost time capsules of a more innocent time, a place where small movies like this could find an audience of raincoaters who found something, anything erotic in what we would now see as just plain silly.

Sadly for Frost and Cresse, the advent of hardcore would put an end to their films. Then again, Frost would go on to produce and direct one of the oddest - and roughest - films of the golden age of adult films, A Climax of Blue Power. He kept on working right up until 1995's direct to video softcore thriller Private Obsession. I'd also recommend his mondo films Witchcraft '70 and Mondo Bizarro. Oh yeah! He also directed The Thing With Two Heads and The Black Gestapo. He also made Love Camp Seven, which also features Cresse acting as a commander of a German prison camp. Wow. I know more about Lee Frost than some members of my family.

You can download this on the Internet Archive. Even better, Nicolas Winding Refn's ByNWR site has a totally cleaned up version straight from the director's archive. Man, I want to sit down and talk to that dude someday.