Movie Mysteries Solved! The Hugga Bunch, the Mud Monster and More

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Question: There was a movie about a little girl who goes through her mirrored closet door and enters a puppet world with little people with fat faces. There's a library in an apple, and the bookkeeper is a worm, and there's a witch who had to eat some disappearing fruit - maybe pears? - to stay young. Could you please tell me the title of this movie? I heard that it may have something to do with the word "huggies." - Dana

My sister and I have been trying to figure out the name of a movie we saw when we were younger. It was about a girl and how she could step through the mirror in her room and go into a fictional land with weird creatures. I specifically remember her shoe getting stuck in the mirror and the girl having to get some of her creature friends out of jail. Please help! - Alexis

FlickChick: Over the course of my eight years of writing Ask FlickChick, these are only two of the many questions I've received about what was clearly the same fantasy movie. It stumped me until this week, when I quite accidentally came across The Hugga Bunch/ The Hugga Bunch Movie, a 1985 live-action/puppet-animation TV feature that was apparently a cross-platform product tie-in with some utterly, unbelievably hideous plush toys the Hallmark company spun off from a series of greeting-card characters. I have zero memories of anything to do with the Hugga Bunch, but the movie clearly crawled into a lot of youngsters' heads and stayed there, nagging at them. Here's a page from a toy-related fan site devoted to the movie. The Hugga Bunch was released on commercial video and is now out of print, but there are used copies available on Amazon and other sites - the cover art makes it look like an animated movie, but it's not. I've also seen DVDs for sale on smaller sites, but I have a feeling they're all bootlegs.

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Question: I was recently reminiscing about the first movie I ever saw in a theater. I saw it in the 1970s as part of an elementary-school field trip, and it was about Lafayette's involvement with bringing the French navy to help George Washington defeat General Cornwallis at the battle of Yorktown. I thought the title was something like "Let Freedom Ring," but the only listing I find on IMDB with that title is nothing like the film I remember. Any thoughts on what it might be? - David C.

FlickChick: How about Lafayette (1961), a historical epic about exactly the events you describe? The film was a lavish, French-language French/Italian coproduction, but a lot of dubbed foreign films were released in the U.S. in the 1960s and '70s. You clearly didn't see the film during its initial run, but I remember seeing A Man for All Seasons (1966) on a school trip that had to have been close to a decade after the film was initially released. Lafayette's international cast included U.K. star Jack Hawkins as General Cornwallis, Americans Orson Welles and Howard St. John as, respectively, Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, and French actor Michel Le Royer as the Marquis de Lafayette.

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Question: I am looking for the name of an old Western, probably from the late '40s or early '50s. In the movie, a group of famous star cowboys from that era gathered in this particular town to join forces to combat corrupt elements. I can't recall the names of the stars, so if you would, please try to find out for me. - Russell

FlickChick: I think you're remembering Trail of Robin Hood (1950), a Roy Rogers movie about a retired cowboy star - cowboy star Jack Holt, playing himself - who's trying to make a go of a business selling Christmas trees at affordable prices. Naturally, a heartless big company tries to put him out of business, so Rogers rounds up a posse of other B-stars from Western series - such as Rex Allen, Allan "Rocky" Lane, Ray "Crash" Corrigan, Monte Hale, Tom Keene, Tom Tyler, Kermit Maynard and William Farnum - to help out. The whole thing is weirdly self-referential for a low-budget '50s picture, especially the moment when George Chesebro, who spent much of his career playing shifty-eyed, lily-livered curs, throws in his lot with the white hats, declaring: "I've been a villain in Jack Holt's movies for 20 years; now I'd like to be on the right side for a change."

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Question: I hope you can help me with this, because it's been bothering me for a really long time. When I was a child I saw this movie on TV about a golem or something - something made of mud - and there's a scene where its arm gets shut in a door and the hand gets torn off and crawls away on its own. Do you have any idea what it was? - Bobby G.

FlickChick: Like the question about The Hugga Bunch, I've been getting variations on this one for years and had exhausted my ideas about crawling-hand movies, golem movies and primordial-slime monster movies like Spawn of the Slithis (1978) and Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster (1971). And then, lo and behold, I stumbled across this one while reading about The Norliss Tapes (1973), a made-for-TV movie I fondly remember, which Anchor Bay recently put out on DVD. Like The Norliss Tapes, which starred Roy Thinnes, The World Beyond (1978) was a pilot that never went to series. In fact, it was a second-try pilot, made the year after The World of Darkness; both were scripted by old TV hand Art Wallace and revolved around former sports writer Paul Taylor (prolific TV actor Granville Van Dusen), who survived a near-death experience and found himself able to hear the voices of the dead. The World of Darkness seems to have left no impression on anyone, but The World Beyond, which was subtitled "Episode 1: Monster" (or maybe "Mud Monster") made a hell of an impression on a whole lot of people. I've seen references to a DVD, but I can't find any evidence that there was ever a legitimate video or DVD release of either World of... installment, and I haven't even run across any sources for bootlegs.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

See Maitland "FlickChick" McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks in Movie Talk!