Hubba-hubba! The carpetbaggers match the drapes when Agnes Moorehead takes her four single and ready to mingle (mostly) carrot-topped daughters (Rhonda Fleming, Teresa Brewer, Cynthia Bell, Kay Bell) from the titular city of Seattle to Gold Rush-era Alaska for some snowbound romance and minor Klondike mystery-solving, as the gals try to find their newspaper publisher father’s murderer whilst pitchin’ woo with the fool’s gold worth of lonely prospectors that permeate the Arctic climate.

In between the absolute roster of wonderfully misplaced musical numbers by the likes of Hoagy Carmichael, Johnny Mercer and Ray Evans, these flame-maned fillies are a vivacious trio of backtalkin’ spitfires that are always sampling scandalous cosmetics like “rouge” and high-kickin’ them glammy gams to tunes that uses words like “Alabammy” and “honeylamb,” with momentarily blonde sister (and all-around pesky tomboy) Nellie the constant brunt of gender-fluid ribbings because, even at 12 years old, she’s not a hot-to-trot redhead ready for marriage like her flame-retardant hermanas.

Mother Moorehead, years away from her role as the shrewish Endora on TV’s Bewitched, tries to keep a tight leash on the foursome, but those 1950s-era hormones are running wild and free in 1900s Yukon Territory. With a liberal amount of ankle skin and hand-holdings, all gloriously filmed in 3-D, you actually feel like you’re right there in the parlor, courtin’ one of those interchangeably gorgeous sisters to a badly timed and ill-fitting Jerry Livingston and Mack David tune! If only IMAX had been around then …

At 90 minutes, director Lewis R. Foster’s effervescently buoyant Those Redheads from Seattle is a fun Technicolor throwback where two-fisted men engaged in fisticuffs over the ownership of women in general, and these dames not only like it, they fall madly in love with the big galoots and/or palookas because of it, with a finale full of comically ribald weddings to back it up. If we walk away from Seattle with any lessons learned, it’s that gentleman might prefer blondes, but everyone loves a redhead.  —Louis Fowler

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First things first: Jack the Ripper Goes West is a bullshit title. Second things second: I concede it is infinitely more marketable than the film’s original title, Knife for the Ladies, which simply sounds like the misheard end result of a kindergarten game of Telephone.

In the desert town of Mescal, the men and women are all agog and abuzz over losing yet another perfectly good prostitute to murder! The latest victim had her throat slashed not only horizontally, but postcoitally. Now that somebody’s homicide spree has hit the magic number of three and the cantankerous sheriff (Jack Elam, The Cannonball Run) has no cotton-pickin’ idea who’s responsible, Mescal looks yonder to St. Louis to hire curly-haired detective Edward R. Burns (Jeff Cooper, Circle of Iron), basically a Hercule Poirot for cowpokes. Investigatin’ begins; stabbin’ continues.

There’s nothing wrong with grafting the Whitechapel legend of London onto the dusty landscape of the American Western; mixing and melding of genres is encouraged. But director Larry G. Spangler (The Soul of Nigger Charley) and his writing team (one-third of which is Academy Award winner Seton I. Miller, screenwriter of such classics as Here Comes Mr. Jordan and The Adventures of Robin Hood) have no idea how to lasso that into a compelling story. Evidence of this shows in the picture’s schizophrenic nature, undecided if it should go whole-hog mystery or horror or whathaveyou. No amount of eye candy from Diana Ewing (Play It as It Lays) or glee gained from the bonkers performance of Ruth Roman (The Baby) can make up for Spangler’s cattle-drive pacing, which is why the funny ending isn’t worth the sit to get there.

If you’d like to see a true Ripping yarn with equally psychotronic leanings, watch Jess Franco’s Jack the Ripper instead. Heck, or just watch the one with David Hasselhoff. Either leaves this in the dust. —Rod Lott

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