After traveling to Las Vegas in Las Vegas Hillbillys, Ferlin Husky and Don Bowman return with new recruit Joi Lansing (taking over for Mamie Van Doren) for more gratuitous, clumsily integrated musical performances in Hillbillys In A Haunted House. As the film begins, Husky, Bowman, and Lansing are cruising along a rear-projection highway while singing a cheerful ditty about their upcoming gig at the Nashville Jamboree. But their pleasant drive is rudely interrupted by a shootout between cops and a pair of suit-wearing bad guys who are reportedly part of a huge wave of spies running rampant in the American South. With a storm looming, the trio asks a helpful gas-station attendant whether suitable lodging is available in the area. He recommends a creepy deserted mansion without conveying a seemingly crucial bit of information: "I forgot to tell 'em it's haunted!" he chastises himself after the Nashville-bound group drives out of earshot. Sure enough, the house is filled with such telltale signs as cobwebs, a spooky painting, somebody in a cheap-looking gorilla costume, and, perhaps most egregiously, a trio of antiquated icons of an earlier cinematic age (John Carradine, Basil Rathbone, and Lon Chaney Jr.) dressed like undertakers. Scary stuff, indeed, but not nearly as spooktacular as what booze and the ravages of time have done to the bloated face of the hulking, poorly preserved Chaney. The horror-movie legends turn out to be part of a spy ring refreshingly committed to employing the aged and sinister-looking, and intent on stealing the top-secret recipe for a special kind of rocket propellant. After receiving permission to stay the night with a much younger Asian woman in cahoots with Chaney, Rathbone, and Carradine, the hillbillys settle in for a night of screaming, simian shenanigans, horror effects usually confined to haunted houses run by less discriminating traveling carnivals, and, of course, gratuitous musical performances, including one by a young Merle Haggard. Husky and Bowman eventually foil the cabal's evil plan, and the trio continues on to the Nashville Jamboree, which sadly poses little threat to the Country Bears' domination of the jamboree form.
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