Burl reviews Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet The Killer, Boris Karloff! (1949)

Ha ha, numbskulls, it’s Burl! No, I don’t really mean to call you numbskulls! I’m just reviewing an Abbott and Costello picture, that’s all! And you know, I haven’t actually seen too many Abbott and Costello pictures, now that I come to think about it! Oh sure, I’ve seen The 30 Foot Bride of Candy Rock – ha ha, who hasn’t? – but not very many of the classic, actual movies featuring the two of them doing their routines!

But now I’ve seen this one, ha ha, and with a title like that, who could resist? I’ll watch anything with Boris in it, though his last few pictures are a little depressing, ha ha! But he was a great actor, and, I have it on good authority, a great fellow as well!

Now of course this picture belongs not to Boris “The Man They Could Not Hang” Karloff, but to Abbott and Costello! And these two jokesters do it up pretty well, I must say, especially Costello! He’s really pretty funny in his role as an accident-prone bumbler of a hotel porter! Abbott plays the house dick, and that makes me wonder if hotels still have detectives like they used to! Anyway, the two fellows work at the Lost Caverns Hotel, and when eminent attorney Amos Strickland comes in one night on the eve of the release of his memoirs, has Costello fired and then gets murdered, the stage is set for all manner of slamming-door shenanigans!

There are plenty of murders, and all the corpses pop up in Costello’s closet, so it looks pretty bad for him, ha ha! Karloff is lurking about as a menacing swami, and the scene everybody mentions is when Karloff tries to hypnotize Costello into committing suicide, but the tubby bellboy is simply too stupid to accomplish the task! But, ha ha, there are funnier scenes than that, or at least I thought so! I did enjoy when they finally made it into the caverns below the hotel (for what seems like forever, ha ha!) and Costello became a human drain-plug! You’ll have to see it to know what I mean, and it’s a pretty impressive feat of floor effects!

Costello’s delivery is often hilarious, particularly whenever he underplays! Abbott is pretty much the ideal of the straight man! On the other hand, the movie is pretty repetitive, and lots of the jokes are flat bananas! Costello is on the border of being a character like Bill or Sam or Radio, and I can’t say that his slow-wittedness didn’t get annoying!

I got some laughs, and the foreground matted caverns are really impressive and beautiful! Great stuff! But it goes on a little long and doesn’t make quite as much sense as it should! I’m going to give Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet The Killer, Boris Karloff two coffin-shaped laundry trollies!

Burl reviews Tower of London! (1939)

Hi, Burl here with a bit of history for you! I don’t think it’s what you’d call very accurate history, but it sure is exciting and scary! Ha ha, when you’ve got Boris Karloff playing a hulking, club-footed executioner named Mord, you know it’s going to be a journey into fright!

The picture’s called Tower of London, and though it gets called a horror movie a lot, and is filled with horror stars, and is directed by Rowland V. Lee, a guy best known, inasmuch as he’s known at all, for his horror movies, I’d still say it sits somewhere in the netherworld between spookshow and straight historical drama! But I guess classifying the movie isn’t  the most important thing now, is it!

It’s the story of Richard III’s cruel and heartless path to the throne of England! Ha ha, he keeps a wee dollhouse with figures representing all those between him and the crown, and every time he manages to get rid of one, he tosses their doll into the fire! As this takes him several years, I had to wonder that apparently no one, a servant dusting the room for instance, or maybe one of his wives, ever found his macabre and rather incriminating little display!

The one-by-one nature of his fatal userptions gives it a bit of a slasher move aspect too, like Prom Night or something, which is a little bit of extra fun for those of us who know that genre! And the aforementioned great cast of horror stars is yet another marvelous bonus! Ha ha, we get Basil Rathbone, well known from The Scarlet Claw and the other Holmes adventures, as Richard the Crookback, Vincent Price from Dead Heat as his ineffectual drunkard brother Clarence, Leo G. Carroll from Tarantula as a royal adviser and of course Karloff, from Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff, as the terrifying, completely fictional Mord the Dragfoot who is totally and creepily dedicated to his humpbacked master Dick the Third! The rest of the cast is pretty good too!

There’s some good gruesome stuff in this picture! There’s a head-chopping, which of course was a very popular activity of the day, and some scenes in Karloff’s torture chamber, with an iron maiden and a rack and other terrible items; and then of course there’s the scene where Clarence and Richard get into a drinking contest and of course, as we know from Shakespeare's play, Clarence ends up in a butt of his favourite Malmsey! Ha ha, how much is a butt, you might be wondering? It’s about three hogsheads! Plenty enough to drown in, anyway! Poor Clarence!

Of course Richard and Mord get their comeuppance on the battlefield, but it’s a long road of murder and torture and intrigue and deceit before then! It all looks great, with that wonderful 30s Universal gleam and some pretty lush sets! It’s a fine picture for sure, and I’d be so bold as to give it three and a half V.I.P. booths!

Burl reviews The Man They Could Not Hang! (1939)

Hi, Burl here! If there’s one actor who consistently brings me joy whenever I see him, it’s Dick Miller, but if there was another one it would be Boris Karloff! (They actually appear together, along with another actor called Jack Nicholson, in The Terror!) I’ve always thought he was great, from his excellent performance as Frankenstein Monster right through to those crappy movies he did near the end of his career! Also, he was marvelous in Targets!

But like his great friend and rival Bela Lugosi, Boris played an awful lot of kindly doctors who turn evil when their plans go awry, and ha ha, so it is in The Man They Could Not Hang! I was expecting something a little more along the line of the stuff Bela was doing around then, like Killer Bats, where he creates a perfume that only giant man-eating bats like, and then tricks all his enemies into dabbing a little of it on their necks – “Right on the tenderest part, please,” he’d always instruct them! Ha ha!

But The Man They Could Not Hang is a little better than that! Boris plays a kindly scientist, Dr. Savaard, who creates an artificial heart that looks like a pair of swinging glass testicles, which he determines would be a good way to revive people from the dead! A medical student volunteers to test this for him, so Boris kills him with gas – but before he can do the revivification, his dumb nurse has panicked and hightailed it for the police! The coppers won’t listen to Dr. Savaard when he says he was just about to bring the guy back to life, and so they just let the poor medical student stay dead and put Savaard on trial for murder! He’s convicted by an all-white jury and then the next thing you know, they’re hooking him up to the old neck-stretcher!

Well, later Savaard’s assistant gets those glass balls a-swingin’ and soon the doc is fighting fit again, though he walks around with his head at a bit of a right angle, as though he’s got a pretty bad kink in his neck! He’s really bitter too, about being executed and all that, and the only thing he wants to do is kill, kill, kill! He invites all those who participated in his demise for a dinner party, and then starts killing them one by one! I won’t tell you how it ends, but there are complications in Dr. Savaard’s plan!

The movie was directed by a guy named Nick Grindé, and I’d say he did a pretty fair job of it! He even did another movie with Boris that was almost exactly the same about a year later! But I’d have liked to see a bit more atmosphere in the movie, like you might find in a Val Lewton picture or something! By the time Dr. Savaard has all his enemies trapped in a room and he’s zapping them with electrified gates or poking them with needles that pop out of telephone receivers (ouch!), it doesn’t much matter, but a bit more style in the early parts would have been most satisfying! There was one shot I thought was really neat – in the press room, just before the execution, the camera is kind of dutchy (which is to say tilted) and it straightens out slowly as it dollies back! Cool, and very ahead of its time! I give this movie two and a half useless, dangling nooses!