Pluskylang Great Film overall

Ceticultsot Beautiful, moving film.

Taraparain Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

Mathilde the Guild Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

utgard14 Corny short film put out by Universal that gently mocks Nosferatu and their own Frankenstein. There's footage from both of those films included. Why Nosferatu instead of Universal's recently-released Dracula, I don't know. They also include some bits from The Cat Creeps (1930), which is now a lost film. That's fun for classic film buffs. There's kind of a Pete Smith vibe about the short but it's not as funny as one of his. I'm sure it was a lot more amusing in 1932 than it is today. To be clear, I'm not saying it's bad. It's a pleasant enough way to spend ten minutes. If you're a fan of classic horror films, you will probably enjoy it more than most. But there's nothing special about it beyond the clips from The Cat Creeps.

Hot 888 Mama . . . knowing that with today's copyright laws designed to make rich people richer and put gazillions of bucks into lawyers' pockets from the scant savings of ordinary people and entrepreneurs, he could have SUED Universal Studios for COPYING HIS VOICE and speaking cadence in this 9 minute, 29.9-second horror movie spoof, BOO! (think an ancient template for the SCARY MOVIE franchise)? Under current law, anyone with the money for legal fees (think rich people and their corporations) can trademark catch phrases such as "Please!" or "Holy cow!" as well as ANY distinctive speech variation that deviates from a flat monotone as well as any jumble of letters forming a made-up syllable as well as any quirky body movement such as the "moonwalk" as well as any musical combination of two notes or more as well as most of the first names in the baby moniker tomes (think "Cher" or "Madonna") as well as any line of computer code AND SUE THE PANTS OFF any college kid's parents if the kid has any access to computers! Further, Hollywood has single-handedly gotten what was already an arguably too generous copyright period--originally 28 years--extended to 88 years and counting!! That's the irony of BOO!--Hollywood would not dare to make it today, due to its own crazy rules designed to terrorize the rest of us!

arel_1 The main reason this seems so unfunny to many younger viewers is that a lot of the humor was topical, and topical humor becomes unfunny as soon as the topic is no longer "current events"--how funny will "Dubya" jokes seem by around 2084, when they'll be about as old as the jokes in "Boo!"? I'm twenty-some years younger than "Boo!", and the only reason I got most of the topical jokes is that I'm a big fan of 1930s movies thanks to having grown up when TV stations showed movies late at night instead of infomercials (yes, kids, they really used to do that!) You miss a lot of the humor in older movies if you can't time-travel between the ears.

J. Spurlin "With times as tough as they are," intones the narrator, "we present our formula for the cheapest kind amusement: nightmares." We see an unkempt man in some kind of 19th century get-up—coat, vest, a black tie with an enormous bow—eating lobster, drinking milk and reading "Dracula." "We've all heard of the worm that turned," says the narrator. "But this is the bookworm that turned. Inside out." When the man has a feeling that's a "cross between delirium tremens and the seven year itch" he's ready for his nightmare."A good nightmare always begins with a dark cellar and a coffin," he continues. As the dream progresses, we see that it consists of footage from "Nosferatu" (1922), "Frankenstein" (1931) and "The Cat Creeps" (1930). The footage is spliced together to make Dracula and Frankenstein's monster appear to be sharing the same rooms. For comic effect some footage is repeated several times, or run backwards and then forwards again. Dracula's caretaker crawls up and down the stairs over and over: "It looks as though he's having his ups and downs. He acts like Congress and always ends up where he started. This exercise is good for water on the knee, water on the brain and other naval diseases. It is also a good way to enjoy the jitters without drinking alcohol." The narrator pities the man: "If I were in his place I'd resign—or at least quit." He describes Dracula's entrance: "So Dracula comes up close and shows us what the well-dressed ghost is wearing. He throws his silhouette on the wall, and the wall is so scared it looks as if it's plastered."And now the blood may spurt any minute." He adds dryly: "Gush, gush."Dracula departs: "So he decides to go back to his coffin and sleep for a hundred years until Congress decides to do something about the Depression."Frankenstein's Monster enters and "starts to look for trouble. There's so much trouble around these days, he shouldn't have any trouble finding it." The Monster dithers: "He can't decide which way to go. He's like a woman automobile driver."The Monster watches Dracula (actually the costumed villain from "The Cat Creeps") steal a diamond necklace off a sleeping woman, studying the vampire's "tesh-nee-kyoo." (I had to replay that a couple times: it's a cutesy pronunciation of "technique.")The short ends with the Monster reaching toward the heavens, where we cut back to the new footage and see the frightened dreamer sitting on a chandelier. "And the moral of this story is: you can milk a cow, but a lobster is very ticklish."This film is a very close imitation of the specialty shorts Pete Smith was making for MGM: silent footage narrated with wisecracks. Even Smith's narrating voice—nasally, dry, sarcastically gee-whiz—is mimicked. Why does this Carl Laemmle-produced film use clips from the 1922 "Nosferatu," rather than Laemmle's own "Dracula"? Maybe because unlike Bela Lugosi, the German vampire was ugly: "There's the profile that has won first prize in all the ghost beauty contests. When Dracula was born, his mother took one look at that face and had herself arrested. A guy with a face like Dracula must be a spook, or he'd have his face lifted. And the worst of it is, this spook looks screwy—and there's nothing screwier than a screwy spook."Hear the rim shots? "The caretaker decides that he might have been seeing things. Maybe his near beer was nearer than he thought." How about now?However unfashionable the jokes, I laughed at some of them. And we can be grateful "Boo" preserves the only known surviving footage from "The Cat Creeps." Think your favorite movies will last forever? Boo!