You hate to be the guy who craps on a passion project by a young director who clearly cares about his subject. There is no joy in this: ‘Rondo and Bob’ is a tough sit, an amateurish production that is clumsily edited, poorly acted and dismally written.
If I sound particularly offended it’s because director/writer/actor Joe O’Connell had piqued my curiosity about the two titular men,
Bob Burns was the legendary art director of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre who went on to work on modern Horror classics like The Hills Have Eyes, Re-Animator, and The Howling.
Rondo Hatton is also a cult figure from the horror world. A man whose medical condition (acromegaly) caused his face to turn into a wonderfully weird and spooky visage that ended up being perfect for typecasting in many minor roles and a couple of feature parts in 1940s Universal releases, such as House of Horrors
So, the idea of this documentary is a bit of a splatter, which is to say unfocused and lacking in a clear narrative that one could type out in a short paragraph.
The biggest problem, I think, is that O’Connell has chosen to stage “recreations” of the subjects. These vignettes pop up randomly, interrupting any narrative flow with poorly staged, bad community theatre-style acting that diverts from the real Rondo and Bob.
There are some interviews with real people who know their history of these two horror film figures, including veteran stuntman Gary Kent (Bubba Ho-Tep, “The Green Hornet”), actress Dee Wallace (Cujo, The Howling), Re-Animator director Stuart Gordon, Joseph Middleton, Joe Bob Briggs, Hills Have Eyes producer Peter Locke, Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s Edwin Neal, filmmaker Fred Olen Ray.
An interesting fact: Bob Burns was a guy who look perfectly “normal”, yet had a complex and troubled personality – he was weird. Meanwhile, the guy who looked weird and scary was, by all accounts, perfectly “normal.” He was a former journalist who lived a quiet life with his wife.
More factual bits like this would have made this feel more like a legit documentary and less like a first draft of a student film
Rondo and Bob is available on streaming platforms from Electric Entertainment.