ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Exploitation-film historian A.C. Nicholas, who has a sketchy background and hails from parts unknown in Western Pennsylvania, was once a drive-in theater projectionist and disk jockey. In addition to being a writer, editor, podcaster, voice-over artist, and sometime actor and stand-up comedian, he’s a regular guest co-host on the streaming Drive-In Asylum Double Feature and has made multiple appearances on Making Tarantino: The Podcast. He also contributes to the Drive-In Asylum fanzine, the B & S About Movies Podcast, and the Horror and Sons website. His most recent essay, “Of Punks and Stains and Student Films: A Tribute to Night Flight, the 80s Late-Night Cult Sensation,” appeared in Drive-In Asylum #26.

One of my favorite obscure film genres is “films with comedy redubbing,” where filmmakers take existing footage and add a new, comedic soundtrack. Most folks-in-the-know would probably consider What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966), as the first of its kind, a film where Woody Allen took a Japanese spy film and redubbed it to hilarious effect. But Jay Ward, the creator of Rocky and Bullwinkle, was there before Allen with his syndicated TV show Fractured Flickers (1963). Ward and his voice-actor cohorts, like Paul Frees, Bill Scott, and June Foray, used footage from silent films and turned Lon Chaney, Sr.’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame into Dinky Dunstan, Boy Cheerleader and Rin Tin Tin into Foam, King of the Mad Dogs. The beloved Ward was a genius, and his show was way ahead of its time. It could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the best skits from SNL today. 

Over the years, there have been a few more of these Frankenstein-like creations: J-Men Forever (1979), created by The Firesign Theater, which used old Republic film serials and was a staple of the classic USA Network show Night Flight; Revenge of the Sun Demon, a/k/a What’s Up, Hideous Sun Demon (1983), a riff on The Hideous Sun Demon (1958), with a young Jay Leno voicing the title character; Mad Movies with the L.A. Connection (1985), a syndicated TV series created from public-domain features; and Kung Pow! Enter the Fist (2002), where comedian Steve Oedekerk, redubbed all the characters and injected himself into a Jimmy Wang Yu movie.* Los Angeles film archivist Mike Davis and his company Stag Films have done Sex Galaxy (2008), with footage from Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968), and President Wolfman (2012), based on The Werewolf of Washington (1973). I recently saw Dead, White & Blue (2025), Davis’s latest film, at the wonderful Babylon Fest at the Babylon Kino in Columbia, South Carolina.

To create the “green movie,” so named because it uses recycled footage, Davis poured over more than 300 public domains films—mostly training and educational films from the U.S. government, military, and law enforcement—to create a zany tale about the KKK’s using a shrink ray (like in The Fantastic Voyage (1966)) in an attempt to retrieve an incriminating bullet from the body of a dead black man who was killed by a racist cop. And that’s just for starters, as the main plot takes various turns and digressions before ending with a hilariously over-the-top “Go Murica” image from some forgotten training film.

The festival audience got a kick out of Dead, White & Blue, as did I, even though it didn’t play in its optimal setting as a midnight movie. (And I’m pretty sure that for many of us in attendance, the ingested substances hadn’t even kicked in.) I can’t imagine how much work it took to find the footage, put it together into a cohesive narrative, and then retcon a funny dub track. (One thing in Davis’s favor was that his “lead actor” was in multiple films.) I suspect that you could make a dozen indie films in the time it took to create this small wonder. Many jokes, both broad and obscure, hit the mark. (I was the only one who laughed at this sly exchange between two characters: “What’s happening now?” “I liked the original better!”) My only quibble with Davis’s stellar editing and joke writing is that, at 87 minutes, the movie is about 15 minutes too long. Some judicious editing of the sluggish sections would put this film in a league with J-Men Forever, the platinum standard for this tiny genre.

Dead, White & Blue is currently on the festival circuit. Check it out. I’m going to seek out the two earlier films by Mike Davis. He’s an amazingly talented guy.

*I’m excluding films like Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982) with Steve Martin and Allen’s Zelig (1983), where actors interact with old footage without a completely new dub track.