CommentsXp Best movie ever!

BelSports This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Erica Derrick By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Deanna There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

gridoon2018 Laughs....chills....howls....thrills! Or at least that's what the tagline promises. But you won't find too many of any of the above in "Scared Stiff". The setup is not unpromising (a murder in a bus as it's passing through a tunnel), but when the action settles down in a tavern / inn, the film becomes static: it is always a bad sign when an one-hour running time feels more like three. It's much more of a comedy than a mystery, but there are only two moderately funny sequences: one with a car that keeps honking when Haley approaches it, and one with several people coming in Haley's room and then hiding as other people, who must not see them there, keep coming. The DVD print of the Alpha version is in pretty poor shape, but I suppose we should be thankful that some of these obscure B-movies are available at all. ** out of 4.

MartinHafer Jack Haley stars as a bumbling reporter who has a chess column in the paper. However smart he is when it comes to this game, he's a rather absent-minded and oblivious writer--missing important non-chess stories that occur all around him. The newspaper owner is at his wits end and offers Haley one final chance--or he's fired. It seems all the REAL reporters are off investigating a sensational prison escape, so they have to have Haley report on a grape festival. But, when he gets on the wrong bus, he's pulled into another unexpected story, as the guy next to him is stabbed to death during this trip! And, naturally, they suspect Haley of this crime. Haley is torn between trying to sneak out of town to get to the festival and trying to solve the murder to get the police off him.This film is a comedy-mystery film and it tries very hard to be goofy--with middling results. Sometimes, it's cute and clever and sometimes it comes off as very forced--such as including the ridiculous child prodigy character. This kid is 100% unrealistic and just plain annoying--even though the writer clearly intended the kid to be comic relief. The only relief I might have felt was if HE had been the murder victim! And, as the film progressed, I kept hoping he'd be next! Fortunately, he's not in the movie all that much--otherwise I might have bailed on this movie before it concluded. What I did like was Haley and his pleasant performance. And, for a B-mystery film, this is pretty good for the most part. While not a great film, it's an agreeable film...plus the brat gets it in the end!

Terrell-4 Larry Elliot (Jack Haley), first-rate chess enthusiast but fourth-rate newspaper reporter, is off to Grape City where the Grape City Winery will crown Miss Muscat. In a lovesick mistake, he buys a ticket to Grape Center where perky antique storeowner Sally Warren (Ann Savage) is headed to make a mysterious purchase. It only takes an instant to see that Elliot is naive, innocent, foolish and as dense as a pound of lard. Think of Haley here as unpleasantly like a dim second banana to Harry Langdon. We wind up staying at the Grape Center Inn and Winery where an extremely valuable chess set has been hidden. This tired, tired mystery comedy features the inn's owners, the elderly, eccentric and competitive Walbeck brothers; the elderly and severe desk manager; the pain- in-the-rear child prodigy who thinks he knows all about fear stimuli; the glowering keeper of the prodigy; the not elderly at all Veda Ann Borg; the suspicious "Professor;" and a tough escaped murderer who just might be the owner of the chess set, There's creeping about at night, hidden passages, a turning door, a toupee, wine vats and a car horn. Jack Haley said once that if it weren't for the performance he gave as the Tin Woodman in The Wizard of Oz, he'd probably be forgotten. Sadly, it's true. Scared Stiff tries for laughs and frights. If it doesn't succeed at least we've only wasted 65 minutes. For those who can remember two-movie matinees for 25 cents, where the audience didn't evaluate the laughs, just enjoyed them, it's difficult to come down hard on something like this. There's no harm intended and no harm caused. In a brief opening scene an actor named Edward Earle plays, unbilled, Larry Elliot's impatient uncle. We see him once. Earle was born in 1882, had a reasonably successful career as a lead in the early silent movies but slipped to second leads by the start of the talkies. From there he faded precipitously. By the end of the Thirties he was doing unbilled bits, and stayed there through television until he finally called it a day in 1960. As an old man, Earle was asked by Ben Bagley to take part in Bagley's Revisited series...LPs (and then CDs) of little known songs Bagley discovered from some of the very best theater song writers. And it so it came about that Edward Earle sings several Cole Porter songs on Ben Bagley's Cole Porter Revisited Volume 2. He's funny, a bit lascivious when called for and knows exactly what he's doing to put across a Porter lyric. He's just grand. He's also memorable doing "Dainty Quainty Me," cut from The Seven Lively Arts because Bert Lahr refused to sing "enema' (which Porter rhymed with "cinema"}. In Bagley's Noel Coward Revisited, Earle sings three songs, including the unmistakably left-handed and sophisticated "Green Carnations," a witty song all can enjoy, especially if you're a young, languid man about town. Earle died, full of years, in 1972 at the California Motion Picture Country Home. He was 90.

dbborroughs The plot of this movie has a forgetful chess editor going off to cover a grape festival. His uncle, who runs the paper, hopes this will turn him into a normal reporter (When he covered the funeral of the mayor he failed to mention a woman's suicide over the grave, nor does he mention the riot that occurred at the chess match he was covering when he was called away for the grape festival assignment.) In typical fashion he takes the wrong bus to the wrong place and ends up mixed up in with a gang of wanted killers.This was the first time I had ever knowingly watched a Jack Haley movie other than the Wizard of Oz. While I thought his performance was good I absolutely hated his character. No one could be that stupid and so unaware of what was going on around him. He's the type of person that you could set on fire and he'd pay it no mind. Its completely unbelievable. It ruins what should otherwise be an excellent little film that has a good B cast, some chills and thrills.If you're curious you could try it, perhaps Haley's character won't run you the wrong way, as for me this goes into the no need to repeat pile.