Worse than Gumby and Pokey Having Sex with Davey and Goliath: KEY LARGO: Arguably the Worst Movie Ever Made

Imagine these four in any configuration of your choosing. It's still less traumatizing than being forced to watch Key Largo in its entirety.


I had to spend time with a patient during the day and into the night yesterday. He used the one of the hospital's luxury features to request a particular movie. In this case it was a particularly bad movie.Thank goodness my work week is complete and I even have a long weekend as a result of having put in excess hours. I need the extra hours to recover from the trauma of having been forced to sit through the movie Key Largo. If you thought the song was bad -- the one sung by Jim Jones look-alike Bertie Higgins about having it all just like Bogie and Bacall --  don't even attempt to

 watch the movie.

It's an asinine plot. It starts with a character played by Bogey going to a hotel in Key Largo in the post-winter off-season to visit the widow (Nora)  and father (Temple) of a former military comrade who didn't make it through the war alive.  The character played by Bacall almost immediately develops the hots for Bogey's character despite being a relatively recent widow.

It also involves a a motley crew of fishermen and fisherwomen who are actually just criminals. They, too, are hiding out at the resort on Key Largo, with a boat waiting for them,  in the post-winter off-season when a hurricane unseasonably strikes. A sheriff  and his deputy show up show up looking for a couple of Osceola Indians on some minor and probably trumped up charges.

A group of Osceola Indians, including the two for whom the sheriff and his deputy are looking,  show up to take refuge from the immediate post-winter hurricane at the resort, where they usually take refuge under such circumstances. The posing fisherpeople take everyone else hostage and won't let the Osceola Indians inside.

The deputy comes back and gets himself killed by Curly and boated into distant waters, then thrown in the Caribbean by the worst of the bad guys -- Curly, I think.

Curly is desperate for entertainment and forces one of the female fisherpeople guests, who may or may not be one of the criminals, Gaye Dawn, who also happens to be an alcoholic,  to sing some gawdawful song called "Moanin' Low"  a capella in exchange for a drink.  The actress portraying her is not a singer and assumes she'll just lip sync to an actual singer's voice, but the director forces her (at gunpoint? I wouldn't be surprised) to sing the song without even first rehearsing it. She sings it so horribly that Curly refuses to give her the drink. The Bogey character ignores Curly and gives Gaye Dawn her drink anyway.

The sheriff comes back. Curly or somebody forces Temple to lie to the sheriff about the deputy's whereabouts. Then the sheriff finds his deputy dead in the water. The hurricane brought his body close enough to shore to be found. Curly  tells the sheriff the Osceola Indians killed the deputy. The sheriff inexplicably believes him, and plays judge, jury, and executioner, shooting and killing the Osceola Indians. The sheriff leaves with the deputy's body.

Another contingent of the criminal element arrives from Cuba with a large sum of counterfeit money. Curly and his henchmen must escape but for some reason cannot take their original boat, so instead take one owned by the hotel, forcing the Bogey character to pilot the boat for them because he has boating experience. Curly inexplicably pays temple for the criminals' stay at the hotel. probably using the counterfeit money.

Frank throws one bad guy (Ralph?) overboard, shoots another, then Curly comes up from the lower deck and gets killed in gunfire. Anyone else who is bad is killed, I think. Part of the criminal gang was elsewhere, but the Coast Guard captured them.

Gaye Dawn tells the sheriff he was duped into killing the Osceola Indians Nora and f/rank forget all about Nora's late husband and Frank's former comrade and hook up. I don't know what happened to Temple, and I care even less than I know.

According to Bertie Higgins, they had it all, so why the hell did they agree to make that horse shit movie?

I would rather be forced to watch Davey and Goliath have an identical Claymation-simulated  gun shoot-out with Gumby and Pokey (or Claymation-simulated human-on-animal sex, for that matter) ten thousand times  than be forced to watch even a thirty-second clip of this movie again. It is going to give me nightmares, not because it was scary but because it was the most deplorable attempt at a movie that I could ever imagine. If I ever see that patient's name on a docket again,, I am calling in sick even if I have to hit my other foot with the bulky part of someone's computer charger and break it (either the foot or the charger or both) to get out of watching any more movies the patient chooses.

   I've said it already, but I'm sure Jim Jones and Bertie Higgins were twins separated at birth.



And just because the song will run continuously through my head all night,  wouldn't you love to have it run through yours as well?