USA. 2020.
Crew
Director/Screenplay/Producer – Joe O’Connell, Photography (colour + b&w) – Kirk Hunter. Production Company – Nickle Pickle Films.
Cast
Ryan Williams (Bob Burns), Joseph Middleton (Rondo Hatton), Kelsey Pribilski (Mae Hatton), Kyle Hurley (Gunnar Hansen), Larissa Dali (Nurse), Adam Littman (Tobe Hooper), Margaret Hoard (Erma Taylor), Madelyn Morton (Mary Church)
With
Robert A. Burns, Chris Bonno, Joe Bob Briggs, Allen Danziger, John Dugan, Michael Finnell, Stuart Gordon, David Gregory, Del Howson, John Kelso, Craig Muckler, Fred Olen Ray, Deborah Pastor, Daniel Pearl, William Vail, Dee Wallace
Robert Burns (1944-2004), not to be confused with Robbie Burns, the 18th Century Scottish poet, came to fame after designing the unique house of bones in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). Burns was subsequently employed as an art director on a number of other films including The Hills Have Eyes (1977), Tourist Trap (1979), The Howling (1981) and Re-Animator (1985). He made one directorial outing with Mongrel (1982) and the uncompleted Scream Test in the late 1980s.
Burns was an expert on Rondo Hatton (1894-1946), an actor who gained some fame in Hollywood for his distinctive misshapen appearance, which was due to suffering from acromegaly. He appeared in a number of films since 1927 but only gained his fame in the last couple of years of his life after appearing as The Creeper in the Sherlock Holmes film The Pearl of Death (1944). He was quickly placed in a number of horror films with Jungle Captive (1945), The Brute Man (1946), The House of Horrors (1946) and The Spider Woman Strikes Back (1946),
Rondo and Bob is a quasi-Documentary about both Robert Burns and Rondo Hatton. It was a debut feature for Joe O’Connell who had previously made several short films, including the Covid lockdown-shot two-minute short Meet the Creeper! (2020) about Hatton. The documentary alternates a scanty amount of film footage and some photographic material with staged dramatisations of key events from Burns and Hatton’s lives. This is interspersed with interviews with assorted people who mainly knew and worked with Burns, although there are not as many still around who knew Hatton. Surprisingly enough, one interviewee is B movie director Fred Olen Ray who proves an authority on Hatton.
O’Connell’s thesis throughout is that Rondo Hatton had a terrible disfigurement but lead a surprisingly normal life, while Robert Burns was outwardly normal appearing but led a highly eccentric life. O’Connell takes us through Hatton’s career with dramatised glimpses of select key events like Hatton’s diagnosis and meeting his wife. Similarly, key event of Burns’s life – meeting Tobe Hooper and casting Gunnar Hansen, his short-lived marriage and suicide are dramatised. Oddly, the film never gives us dramatised versions of anything that takes place on the sets of the respective films Hatton and Burns are best known for, quite possibly for copyright reasons.
The failing of Rondo and Bob is that it takes two subjects who had very unusual lives but fails to find anything particularly interesting to say about either of them. We get assorted anecdotes but nothing that really opens either’s lives up. There are odd eccentricities, particularly in the Burns story – his costumes and performances including with an apparatus that made it look like he had two other bodies attached to him – but the film never digs up too much more beyond these quirks. It’s okay – I feel like I knew more about the two people now than I did before but not anything that has significantly changed my life.
It is when it comes to the dramatisations that Rondo and Bob starts to fall down. Ryan Williams doesn’t much look like the photos we see of Robert Burns. Moreover, you get the impression that Joe O’Connell did not have much experience staging scenes or directing actors and many of the scenes comes across with forced performances or seem only like a professional level of amateurism. This falls down especially when it comes to the makeup on Joseph Middleton who plays Rondo Hatton. Hatton had unique features but the film creates something exaggerated out of them that makes it look like someone merely wearing a weird facial appliance.
Trailer here