14: The Abnormal Female (1969, George Rodgers)

Owned release: The 2006 DVD put out by Something Weird & Image Entertainment. This is the second of three featured films on the disc, sandwiched in between One Shocking Moment and Maidens of Fetish Street.

Acquired: July 1st, 2017 from Amazon.

Seen before?: No.

Yup, that's this site's first NSFW image. Showed up a bit quicker than I expected, I'll be honest.

This, though, is also a remarkable indication of the film to come - it can't even get through the opening credits without pushing out some naked flesh. Literally the first image in the film is that of an FFM threesome, and an unceasing parade of sexual imagery continues under the whole of the opening credits. All are images that will reappear later in the film - the image above, for instance, is extracted from the film's second segment, regarding a housewife who is compelled towards extramarital affairs - but sans context it still serves as a statement of purpose: You came for some sex, you're gonna get some fuckin' sex, mister.

This being 1969, the mainstream breakthrough of hardcore porn is just around the corner, and The Abnormal Female plays like a film with a foot in both camps - the single-mindedness of a hardcore film joined to the cynical, judgmental morality endemic to a lot of sexploitation of this era (though, to be fair, that attitude was hardly limited to the grindhouse circuit). Mostly, this feels intensely frustrated at not having been made and released three years later, and that anger comes out in the treatment of the women in the film. It's framed as a series of case histories by a psychologist who specializes in this sort of thing, and as the title implies, it's very concerned with a "right" way to be a female in opposition to all we see here. These profiles concern, in order, a sadist, a serial adulteress, a nymphomaniac, a married couple of swingers and a lesbian; as their sordid histories are being depicted, the narrator in the guise of the psychologist breaks down their neuroses with no small amount of tongue-clucking. This is especially strong in the second segment, wherein the adulteress's outside activities are explicitly contrasted with her married sex life - the latter is "decent" (read: dull), the sort of thing where the husband likes to do it in one way and that's all that's being brought to the party, while the former is taboo enough that the woman demands to be demeaned by her lovers in the filthiest terms imaginable.

Yet, sex needs filth, right? Because of that, there's another part of me that wonders if this is a bit of a jape, an ironic laugh up the sleeve at the notion of sexual mores by aspiring pornographers. I sense a bit of hand-tipping at times: in the ludicrous outsized origins and appetites of the nymphomaniac, who spied on her parents both in the act and during solo work, the latter of which led to her own taste for self-pleasure, and once had fifteen guys in one afternoon and by the way, she's also fifteen years old; in the sadist finding a way to torture her slave with citrus fruit; in the married couple being horny enough to fuck every day and eventually get into threesomes but still wholesome enough to call it "intercourse." The Abnormal Female is the kind of grungy black-and-white chunk of sleaze that tut-tuts about the sleaze while making sure to slather it on you in great greasy dollops, and part of the amusement is the friction between word and deed, between the ostensible morality being espoused and the actual one being depicted. Are the filmmakers looking down their nose or thumbing it? Do the quotes on the title card belong around the whole thing or just the second word?

The bigger question, though, is: Does that really matter? Because, if I am to judge every film by its intent, then I must loop back to the beginning of the review and get back to the main intent of this film. Which is fuckin'. Lots of fuckin'. And, in that regard... this is actually pretty enjoyable. It's fairly well-shot for a film of this era, with lots of rich shadowy blacks adding just the right dose of moody grime to the copious rumpy-pumpy, and director George Rodgers has enough skin in the game (excuse the pun) to suss out the occasional startling composition, e.g. the low-angle closeup on Vicky the sadist as she whips her slave, turning her growling visage into a mass of flying hair and swirling leather. The women are more attractive than average, with the actress playing Janet the young married being legitimately supercute, and the guys are... well, the guys are mustachioed skeeves, mostly, but Vicky's slave and Janet's husband Fred aren't so bad, and two non-skeevy guys in a film of this type and time is two more than most. It has its problems - alarmingly, nobody in this movie seems to have ever kissed another human being before, and they stop just short of straight-up licking each other's mouths - but as far as this ignominious genre goes, I've seen a lot worse. The sex is decent, the women are decent, and it's not weighed down with extraneous nonsense. It does its thing in an hour's time and gets the hell out. Wham, bam, thank you ma'am.

13: Able Edwards (2004, Graham Robertson)

Owned release: The 2007 DVD from Heretic Films, the arm of now-defunct boutique label Subversive Cinema established to release micro-indie projects.

Acquired: Sent to me, unsolicited, by the label's publicist shortly before its commercial release.

Seen before?: Once from this disc on March 1st, 2010. Wrote about it here.

This is where I came in...

I didn't much like this novelty-driven gewgaw when I first saw it, but I at least appreciated the spirit in which it was made and commended the effort. Upon a second glance, it was generous to grant even that - this is very much a standing-dog type of movie, where the fact of its existence, especially at this budgetary level, is meant to be attraction enough. Which, sure. I'm proud of the people who made this for achieving what they did given their resources. But, like Bwana Devil or Mr. Payback before it, a film is more than the fact of its existence; at some point, someone is going to be expected to sit through the blasted thing, and all the goodwill towards an innovative production evaporates pretty quickly if said innovation stops at the method of production.

But I'll leave aside the plot and acting and all that for the time, especially since any critique of the story boils down to, "Uh, you made Citizen Kane. We already have a perfectly good Citizen Kane." If this film is being sold on the strength of its innovation, then I'll meet it there. Able Edwards, certified as the first film shot entirely in front of a greenscreen - no sets, no locations, just actors and whatever is programmed into the FX monitor behind them - isn't very good even when judged on that achievement alone because said greenscreen work is unconvincing at all times. The images - mostly large warehouses, boardrooms and other such empty cavernous spaces - are washed-out and fuzzy, especially when contrasted with the flesh-and-blood people standing in front of them; this contrast is only magnified when the backdrop has to do something more elaborate, like the heavily-attended courtroom/arena that provides the setting for the framing device or the amusement park that the title character builds in an effort to provide something different to the VR-addled future society he's been brought into. In an effort to hide as much of the fuzzy backdrop as possible, the majority of shots are framed tightly, with lots of close-up headshots and crowded group compositions. The effect is not unlike watching a cut scene from the Sega CD game Night Trap, with its ugly compositing and cruddy digital effects, except the cut scene last ninety minutes instead of ninety seconds.

I can allow that this is all due to monetary limitations, of course. But there's something I didn't know when I first wrote about this. In my previous review, I dinged the acting as stilted. Turns out, I can't really blame the actors - the camera was in a fixed position the entire time, and the actors had a rough six-foot radius in which to act. Thus, the rigid postures and non-demonstrative performances, the inability for anyone to meet anyone else's eyeline, the incredible disorientation when anyone has to do an action that does require movement. (Even a simple scene of several people walking down a hall results in a cocked eyebrow, since the actors are clearly walking in place.) Which begs the question, should something of this scope have even been attempted at this budget level? Was it a worthwhile pursuit? If the point is to save money on sets, but in doing so you construct a wholly unbelievable world, and you have no imagination left with which to fill it, what have you actually done?

The hell of it is that Able Edwards is aware of its limitations - painfully, openly aware. It's the whole damned, self-defeating point of the narrative: a Walt Disney-esque character driven to provide a dose of reality to a populace too enamored of weightless simulacra, rendered entirely in weightless simulacra. As he goes from the boardroom to the amusement park to the campaign trail to late-life post-tragedy isolation, most everything that comes from his mouth is about the value of reality - "It's time we made something real" is his watchword - yet his surroundings are at all times the cheapest, fakest approximations of his constructed "reality" experience. It's a cognitive dissonance that undoubtedly is meant to be productive and ultimately poignant, given the tragic bent of the narrative, but this time around I found it tiresome and insistent, like a stoned college roommate who won't stop going on about how he really can see the truth of the world now, man, no really, like REALLY sees it. Able has a breakdown early on in the film, which leads to a freak-out in a sanitarium. As he's shrieking "IT ISN'T REAL, IT ISN'T REAL!" at the holodeck showing him pleasant images of a garden, he hammers the glass of the monitors until they crack and shatter, revealing the computer circuitry underneath. The monitors and cracking glass and inner circuitry, of course, are greenscreen images. The irony is piled high enough that I can stand up and say, "Yep, message received, thanks"... and then there's still another hour left in the film. I can only watch the same card trick for so long, sorry.

12: The Abductors (1972, Don Schain)

Owned release: The 2003 DVD put out by Monterey Video as included in the 2004 box set with the other two films in the Ginger series.

Acquired: June 13th, 2012 from Amazon - same order as Strip Strip Hooray, oddly enough.

Seen before?: Nope.

Seems appropriate that a film about a female detective whose main asset is her easy sexuality should turn into an object lesson on the perils of going too fast. Don Schain's The Abductors followed hot on the heels of his Ginger, the 1971 film that introduced Cheri Caffaro's sultry and savage superdick. Turned around quick enough that it also bears a 1971 copyright date, the chief problem with The Abductors is that the speed of production didn't leave any room for innovation - at every point, the reigning ethos seems like, "What if we just made Ginger again?" The biggest difference between the two, best as I can tell, is that this film drops the uncomfortable racism that's the most eyebrow-raising aspect of Ginger and replaces it with a second helping of uncomfortable sexual violence. Erasing ethnic slurs and doubling-down on rape - that's progress in these parts, I guess.

While I'd like to stop there and move on to the next film - this film, for all its discomfort, is intensely boring in the way that only a determined Xerox of a previous success can be - I suppose I should at least try and muck around with the sexual politics on display here. Ginger is strong and confident in her sexuality and takes pride in her desires - the opening scene sees her and her boss at the detective agency bantering, with Ginger making knowing cracks about her long history, e.g. "I'm lying flat on my stomach for a change," whereas the cheerleaders who are kidnapped at the film's outset are explicitly marked as virginal and thus easy marks for predatory males. So far, so standard. But the introduction of another detective, a younger woman who is also sexually confident and a judo champion to boot, complicate things a bit. Carter, the younger woman, is being used as bait to draw out the abductors, yet once her cover is blown, her strength fails her; while it briefly looks like she's going to use her judo expertise to fight her way out, that gets stymied pretty fast and earns her nothing more than some punches in the stomach and some rough tit-squeezing (there's a lot of rough tit-squeezing in this). Ginger, meanwhile, is also ensnared within the trap of the abductors, but she wiles her way out by seducing a gullible guard. It's not enough to be strong in the world of the Ginger films - to get the upper hand, you have to be able to weaponize your sexuality.

With that in mind, the surfeit of rape makes structural sense (though it doesn't make it any less gross) - in this universe, seemingly all depicted sex is also an act of violence. When one of the lead abductors attempts to break down an unwilling abductee by forcing his fingers into her vagina, that's an act of violence; when Ginger gets information out of a guy by handcuffing him to a tree, threatening him with a knife and fondling his junk, that's an act of violence; when the brainwashed cheerleaders cheerfully go to bed with the rich industrialists who've purchased them, that's an act of violence. Even the one seemingly innocent scene of mutual sexual enjoyment, in which Ginger and an Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer-looking advertising executive (with whom she's been flirting in order to set into motion her scheme to infiltrate the abductors) make love on a white shag carpet, turns out to be an act of violence - the advertising man was of course secretly a part of the abduction ring the whole time. And there's no counterbalance scene that's simply Ginger getting some as she professes a love for - the closest she gets to that is her friendly back-and-forth with her boss. Sex is power and power is sex, and never shall the twain be separated. Between the rape, the handcuffing, the sex-slave-creating brainwashing, the multiple scenes where Ginger starts to jerk a dude off only to chuckle and blue-ball him by walking offscreen, the cheerleader with the whip and the general skeeviness (where Ginger appeared to have been filmed in a series of hotel rooms, this appears to have been filmed in a series of basements), I feel like I know maybe a bit too much about Schain and Caffaro's sex life.

11: The A-B-C's of Love (1953, Lillian Hunt)

Owned release: This is included on Disc 2 of the Strip Strip Hooray! collection of burlesque films released on DVD by Something Weird & Image Entertainment in 2012.

Acquired: June 13th, 2012 from Amazon.

Seen before?: Twice before, both from this disc - December 6th, 2012 and August 21st, 2017.

From a film with its roots in burlesque to a burlesque film - how's that for a transition?

How to describe a burlesque film? On one level, it's easy: it's essentially a filmed record of various strip routines, songs and comedy performances meant to approximate a night out at a burlesque hall, with the strip routines being the hook upon which these films are sold. But that just explains what it is - how, then, to explain the curious appeal of the genre, the fascination I find in these dorky, stagebound concoctions that tend to feature some of the worst comedy ever seen and technicals that would embarrass Barry Mahon? And what makes The A-B-C's of Love any better or worse than others of its ilk?

I can only be honest, so I'll start with the obvious: Films of this ilk were built foremost as vehicles for espying beautiful women in just-left-of-taboo states of undress, and I am nothing if not a dedicated cinematic voyeur. Give me a genre whose main intent is to show me some form of nudity, and I'll probably at least dip into it, and if the burlesque film is creaky and dated, at least it's not as rock-stupid as your average nudist-colony film. Beyond that brutish fact, there's an innocence to these films I find appealing - it's wholesome smut, if you will, done with a smile. Plus, they're generally an easy watch; there's a little jiggle, some barn-broad comedy that aims for sniggers without getting too nasty, and the whole thing usually wraps in 70 minutes or so. So, as with any hidebound formula, details and performance choices make the difference between a good time and a forgettable one. That, too - the ripple-effect of small differences within the rigor of formula - is something I find to be of endless interest.

Where then does The A-B-C's of Love fit into the spectrum? Having now seen it three times (for some damn reason), I feel safe in saying that while it isn't the worst burlesque film I've seen (Duke Goldstone's Hollywood Burlesque, which seems to have been filmed entirely from the balcony of the theater it's ostensibly taking place in, is probably my low-water mark for this sort of thing), neither is it much beyond passable, and director Lillian Hunt has done better work, including my current favorite B Girl Rhapsody. When it comes to girl-watching, The A-B-C's of Love is not really the film upon which to mount that defense - its representation of the ecdysiastic arts is one of the less thrilling ones I've seen in this genre, with two dancers (Jill Adams's tap-dance routine and Helen Lewis's spirited can-can) removing zero clothing and at least one dancer (May Blondell) whose lack of enthusiasm is palpable. (It doesn't help Ms. Blondell that the post-dubbed music, in an unusual choice, falls out of sync with her routine at a number of points, nor does it help that print damage has shorn away about a third of her screentime.) Bebe Hughes's cute-coy spinning jig is the undeniable highlight; further tips of the cap go to whomever decided to play the glockenspiel when Blaza Glory starts vigorously shaking her assets and to the cameraman for setting up a real shock-twist by pulling in to highlight headliner Gilda's seductive hair flip after holding every shot at a standard medium length for the previous 60 minutes.

The non-fleshy portions of this are similarly a mixed bag, with a couple uninteresting musical numbers from the MC that scream of needed padding (this barely heaves itself over the hour mark) and comedy routines that mostly boil down to yelling. But two of the routines have an ace in the hole - George "Beetlepuss" Lewis, a burlesque veteran whose muttering half-soused shtick and sly sense of timing stand out amid the constant volume contest. The first of his featured bits, about a bet centering around the counting of hats, is the barest of jokes, but Lewis's growing mix of exasperation and confusion as he tries to prove three times three equals nine makes the sequence work far sharper than written, plus he scores an honest surprise of a laugh with a goofy, well-timed hip gyration. His second starring bit, a long rendition of a very old gag about one man advising another on how to sex his wife to death, is the keeper here. Lewis's combination of disbelief and pre-emptive exhaustion while listening to the instructions, his twitter-pated expulsion of the word "rendez-vous," his sozzled lecherousness when he describes trying to punish his wife through spanking, his wheezy yet committed delivery of the ultimate punchline, his crack timing on the line, "With the cat?" which as a result gets from me one of the biggest laughs I've ever thrown out during a burlesque film every time... he's invaluable, and he sells the bit until it sparkles. It is, at last, the little things that make the difference.

10: Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955, Charles Lamont)

Owned release: Universal box, 2008, you know the drill. (This is on Disc 14.)

Acquired: Amazon. 2014. February. It's a cold winter.

Seen before?: Once from this disc - August 1st, 2017.

So often we end up where we started. Where the team's penultimate Universal film, ...Meet the Keystone Kops, attempted to relight their spark by nestling them amongst some of their formative influences, Mummy brings them back to their roots in a couple of ways. The more obvious is that the types of comedy on display have been rebalanced; where the films immediately preceding it had included predominately physical humor and slapstick, this one scales that back and works in more of the verbal sparring and conceptual bits for which the duo were famed. I don't mean that as a generality - Mummy features restagings of several of the team's well-known bits, including another go at "Changing Room" (featured in ...Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff and before that in Hold That Ghost) and a very funny bit involving a cursed medallion hidden inside a hamburger that I'm told bears a similarity to a poison-swap bit done in both The Naughty Nineties and Pardon My Sarong. There's even a new bit, "Take Your Pick," written specifically for this film and meant to take advantage of the duo's verbal dexterity that nonetheless is based on the same general premise as "Who's on First?"

This may sound like complaining, but it's anything but - letting the boys back on familiar ground loosens them up and lets them fall back into a solid groove. The subsequent film, while not top-echelon, has what's probably the best work of this last stretch; the verbal patter has a welcome snap ("I never had a mummy!" "What'd your father do, win you in a crap game?"), there's some amusing left-field sight gags - Lou using a straw hat as a horn mute, Lou fighting with an arm that's emerged from the mouth of a stuffed lion head - and the plot, though over-complex, has each of its three chief threads culminate in someone donning a mummy costume, so that there's three mummies running around at the climax. Plus, there's a young Michael Ansara running around in a crisp white suit and being generally threatening, which is fun. And there's musical numbers! This last aspect is key, as it belies a fascinating dimension to this film's relationship with the team's established body of work.

There are, to be specific, four dance sequences and one song interspersed through this film. Two of the dance sequences are framed as Egyptian ritualism, while the other two (and the song) are explicitly performances for an audience in a cafe. During the first dance number, a lively and mock-violent piece involving two men, two women, a lot of flips and tumbles, and a little tap-dancing, it struck me that this would be a number not out of place on the burlesque circuit. You know, the same milieu in which Abbott and Costello came up and first made their name(s). The other musical interludes are woven through the film in such a way that they break up the action and provide a contrast, a different type of entertainment... much in the way musical numbers and striptease performances are interlaced with comedic routines in burlesque films. (And just when I thought that the one thing they didn't include was scantily-clad ladies, a beautiful blonde shows up at the end to provide some cheesecake and do a gag involving a snake dance.) What I see here is A&C going all the way back, past the films and into their early days as entertainers to see if they can't recapture that young hunger. That, despite their efforts, they ultimately can't and end up constructing a homage to themselves is also quietly encoded in the final product.

The last scene sees the two opening their own cafe with which to host routines in the vein of the one from the beginning of the film. And by "in the vein of," I mean "exactly the same as" - the routine we see at the end of the film as we tour their shiny new performance space is the one from the beginning of the film. And in that vein, this film sees Abbott & Costello using their own names as the names for their characters for the first time since their film debut One Night in the Tropics. Going back to the beginning often means bringing everything full circle, and while this wasn't intended to be the last vehicle for the team (indeed, they made one more film, Dance With Me, Henry, after this for an independent producer)  nor even their last film under Universal, there's a certain sense of finality that make this a proper outro - a closing of the circle, if you will. This may not have been intended as their final bow, but it works just fine as one anyway. There's worse notes to go out on.

9: Abbott and Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff (1949, Charles T. Barton)

Owned version: The 2008 box from Universal. This is on Disc 10.

Acquired: 2014. Amazon. February.

Seen before?: Once from this disc - July 12th, 2017.

I've a notion, and I can't pretend I have anything novel or unusual to say about it - it's an obvious parallel and one I know has been drawn many times before. I'm positive I've read at least a couple pieces that argued this at greater and more eloquent length, and I feel bad that I can't automatically recall them. But I must go where my brain and the film at hand takes me, so here we are.

As previously discussed in brief with A&C Meet Frankenstein, the horror-comedy has a number of pitfalls. Yet, the genre remains attractive and flourishes despite the myriad examples of it all going horridly, painfully wrong. This may be because said genres, in terms of the reaction they aim to produce, are joined at the hip. Both are genres that, in their base form, mean to provoke gut reflexes rather than intellectual ones; horror goes for screams while comedy goes for laughs, but both are trying to capitalize on unconscious animal instinct in order to produce automatic reactions, unhindered and disarmed expulsions of noise as displays of appreciation. If the limbic reaction can be pushed to physical extremes - a frightened leap from a seat, a helpless doubling-over from laughter - all the better. As the reactions are so similar, it would necessarily be attractive to combine the genres and reap twice the audience-goosing benefits.

It's all in the structure. Both your average comedy and your average horror film are constructed as a series of setpieces meant to provide extravagant releases on the regular; the progression in each can be charted as a sine wave of inaction/rising action/crescendo, with a shriek or a guffaw at the top of each peak that releases the inherent tension and sends the emotional progress sliding back down to a state of normalcy. Karloff, which is in order a very funny comedy, a modestly-effective thriller and a slapdash-shrug of a murder mystery, lays the mechanisms just bare enough to make the endeavor a fair stand-in for a whole hybrid genre.Unexpectedly, it's that last clause that makes it so - while Frankenstein is great because it's a great monster movie, Karloff works as well as it does precisely because it's such a shitty murder mystery. If the wrapup and solution are both perfunctory, it's only because said mystery plot is openly a vessel for genre shenanigans, a coathook upon which to hang setpieces like the multiple corpses that get discovered dangling in closets during the run of this goofy film. As such, since the film is a clear and confident pile of ramshackle business, carrying meaning only in the moment insofar as it can make you giggle or shiver, it becomes a sort of referendum on horror-comedies in general. They can be made better, but few have ever been made so pure.
 
The thing is, once you know how the machine works, you can see how it's being tinkered with it in interesting ways. One thing that stands out for me in Karloff is how the expectation for the comedy rule-of-three gets pushed one farther in a number of its setpieces - four poison remedies when Lou is mistakenly assumed poisoned by a dosed champagne cocktail, four methods of attempted suicide when Karloff hypnotizes Lou, four discoveries of the pesky corpse during the "Changing Room" bit. Another is the blatant red herring in the title - Boris Karloff, despite being top-billed among the support and, y'know, being Boris Karloff, is a mere background player. And there's also the simple preponderance of dead bodies contrasted with the genial antics of the stars - despite their previous, extraordinary successful dabblings in the horror and mystery genres, they'd never gone quite this dark nor would they in future works, and there's a certain taboo thrill rooted in upending of expectations in, say, a gag where Lou responds to a bloodstain on a carpet being a potential red herring with, "That's not herring, that's borscht," or a bit where Bud works the distracting-motormouth routine on a hotel patron ("Worst maid we've ever had...") in the service of Lou in disguise trying to wrestle a towel from underneath a corpse in a laundry basket.

Through it all, Charles Barton, a favored collaborator of the boys, keeps the film moving swiftly and sneakily. Where the story moves so fast that there's little time to question how dumb it all is, the action is shot and edited just fast enough to drive home the comedic beats but leave enough space for bits of surprising business, like how the "Changing Rooms" bit is cut at the breakneck pace of a door-slamming farce without losing the moments of quiet that are so important to, in the words of Noel Carroll, Costello's "virtuoso apoplexies." (I especially like Lou's unique attempt at silencing a screaming maid, left on screen for three solid beats and quickly shuffled off before the gag poops out.). There's an easy confidence here endemic to seasoned professionals doing what they do best, all the parts of the machine properly oiled and if we can see the gears turning that's no big deal because the smooth running of the machine is a function not of beauty but of timing. As every seasoned professional knows, the most important thing in comedy - and in horror - is timing.

8: Abbott and Costello Meet the Keystone Kops (1955, Charles Lamont)

Owned release: The 2009 Universal box. This is on Disc 14.

Acquired: Amazon. Feb. 2014.

Seen before?: Once before from this disc - July 24, 2017.

The only one of the ...Meet films that couldn't be slotted sideways into the horror genre, and the weakest of the bunch. The team was well and truly running on fumes here, so a change of pace - going back to straight comedy after a run of genre hybrids - had to be appealing, and with the added benefit of being a homage to the old days of comedy. The late films, due to the necessity of avoiding the team's classic routines (as they were providing material for the duo's TV show), were heavy on the slapstick anyway, so why wouldn't they want to lean into that and pay their forebearers their due respect by crafting a slapstick comedy set during the early days of slapstick comedy - a sort of pratfall-laden wish-fulfillment vehicle/tip of the cap?

It's a nice idea, for sure. The execution, on the other hand... not so much. The funniest part of the movie is the very first sequence, with Lou making a sobbing nuisance of himself while watching a silent epic entitled Eliza and the Bloodhounds (which, in another instance of recycled history, is made of footage from 1927's Uncle Tom's Cabin) and Bud getting thrown into two flower pots within five minutes. Past that, it's a slow slide into genial mediocrity, with a few scattered chuckles (A&C running out of a tunnel with a train in hot pursuit; Lou giving the camera a knowing glance as he palms some loaded dice) and a lot of big, ostensibly-exciting hunks of vehicular mayhem that sit on screen and die. Given the focus on loud, dangerous stunts and car chases/plane chases, it could be argued that this is essentially the A&C equivalent of a big-budget FX comedy... but where the ideal of something like that is, say, Ghostbusters, this is closer to something like Evolution or Leonard Part 6, where the scale and extravagance fail to paper over the tired gags and minimum-effort performances.

What pushes it into the realms of the obnoxious is the film's insistence that this is indeed all a big screaming laff riot - the big biplane sequence has two crew members at two different points laughing hysterically at how funny this all is. One even tells the blowhard European director - who is actually a NYC con man, but that's something else - "This is very funny, Mr. Touminoff!" to which the director replies, "This is not supposed to be funny!" and here I am thinking they're both wrong. As an argument for the value of comedy in the face of misery and the desire to make "serious" art, this is hardly Sullivan's Travels, and the shaking by the lapels, demanding that we LAAAAAAAAAUGH, is unwelcome and frankly surprising for a duo whose chemistry generally makes this all feel so fluid. By the time the Keystone Kops show up to do their thing, the warmth of the homage has curdled into two steps off a rip-off, a film using the reputation of its predecessors to palm off some shabby goods - the Mack Sennett cameo is an embarrassment - and that's even before the final chase sequence straight-up steals a joke from Sherlock, Jr. In retrospect, it's funny that this has A&C tackling a con artist who's gone into making movies, because someone's getting conned here and it isn't the people on screen.

Note of interest: The villain's female sidekick is named Leona Van Cleef. As Lee Van Cleef was just beginning his career at this point, part of me wonders whether that's a weird shoutout or just a coincidence.

7: Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951, Charles Lamont)

Owned release: That 2008 Universal box. This is on Disc 11.

Acquired: Feb. 2013. Amazon.

Seen before?: Once from this disc - July 11, 2017, at which point I gave it an unaccountably-grumpy two stars.

So, best I can tell, my reaction to this one and ...Meet Jekyll & Hyde were swapped - that's the only way I can explain my flipping for the mirthless Karloff vehicle while poo-pooing this knockabout winner. The comedy here is more intensely (and understandably) physical than average, though there's still room for verbal shenanigans (my favorite exchange, after the Invisible Man has shed his clothing to escape a room undetected: "How'd he get out of here?" "In installments.") and the occasional inspired bit of random lunacy, like a hypnosis session that turns into a goof on the stateroom scene from A Night at the Opera. The script was constructed more or less in reverse, building from its delightful boxing climax, and while it generally feels that way - a lot of the plot beats are obligatory, e.g. the Mafia moll who tries to seduce Lou into throwing the fight and doesn't really exert much effort to do so, assuming it a more or less done deal right away - the strength of these later films, as previously discussed, is the points where they find inspiration in the familiar. We've seen Lou get scared by supernatural phenomena, but his reaction upon encountering the Invisible Man in a wood - a high-pitched eep, a levitating-hat gag and a quick in-camera effect that sees him diving completely under a car - is a winner. We expect that the plot will require the boys to catch the moll in the act of compromising Lou, but the gag being constructed so that he's trying to use a massive record player to capture her words is novel and amusing. When Lou feints at a speedbag so that the Invisible Man can sell him as a champion boxer, that's level one; the extra wrinkle comes when Lou hams it up and uses his forehead. The gags are given just enough of a twist to make them land, and the plot moves fast enough that the fact that it's senseless and dopey even by comedy-team standards is besides the point.

And just when you think there's no surprises and it's comfort all the way down the line, Lamont and the boys end on the image of Lou Costello in a diaper and his legs attached backward running in reverse through a glass hospital door. That may not be an ace in the sleeve, but that closing guffaw is worth at least a Queen of diamonds.

6: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948, Charles T. Barton)

Owned release: The modern pack-rat collector knows it's inevitable that occasionally you're going to end up owning more than one of something. So it goes with A&C Meet Frankenstein - because of Universal's curious bundling habits, I own three different copies of this. In addition to the DVD contained in the previously-mentioned 2008 Universal Abbott & Costello box (Disc 9), I have the 2016 Universal releases of the Frankenstein and The Wolf Man Legacy Collections sets. Both of which contain this film.

Acquired: Both of the Blu-rays were purchased this past November. The DVD was, like the others, Feb. of 2013.

Seen before?: I've seen this twice before - once on cable roughly around 1998 or 1999 and once from the DVD on July 7th, 2017. This was my first time on Blu (watched the Wolf Man disc, mainly because that set repeats so much from the Frankenstein set that I kinda felt bad about it not getting as much play).

Ah, now that's the stuff.

Whereas Jekyll & Hyde is a poor A&C vehicle in part because it's also a very poor Jekyll-and-Hyde riff, Frankenstein is the classic it is because it is foremost a terrific Universal-monster movie. Good horror-comedy, whether Young Frankenstein or Re-Animator or Shaun of the Dead, builds out from a core of seriousness about the horror part of the equation. There's a myriad of ways a horror-comedy can step wrong, but chiefly among them is to refuse to treat the threat as a threat; to de-monsterize the monsters is to end up with bumbling buffoonery where there's no legitimate stakes because no character ever really feels in danger (Zombieland being the most egregious recent example of this). This succeeds where Jekyll failed because it manages to juggle two separate tones, often in the same scene, without cheapening either or making it feel like two films awkwardly grafted together - the horror feeds off the comedy and vice versa.

While the panic endemic to Costello's character is the dominant vehicle for the humor, I also really like the bit where Lou goes into Larry Talbot's room to take an apple from his fruit dish, not knowing that Talbot has completed his nightly transformation into the Wolf Man. It's a funny sequence that relies on Lou's lack of knowledge about what's in the room with him - a key point that mines humor from an unexpected angle without devaluing the menace. The Wolf Man is not treated as a punchline but as a threat, and when he jumps at Lou and misses the expected reaction is a jump and a shriek, followed by a laugh; in short, Lou's obliviousness to the danger is the joke. I also adore the early bit where Lou is on the phone with Talbot as Talbot is changing; Lon Chaney Jr. gets to maintain his seriousness while Lou finds the humor in the situation by reacting with befuddled, slightly tetchy logic ("You're awful silly to call all the way from London just to have your dog talk to me.").

That said, most of the humor that branches from the core is based on Lou being extraordinarily aware of the danger he's in and reacting extravagantly, a mode in which Costello excels, being one of the funniest men to ever live when it comes time to spout gibberish and be freaked out past the point of coherence. Just thinking about his fruitless attempt at whistling when in the house of horrors and witnessing Dracula's coffin creak open is enough to get me chuckling to myself. I do think the film gets a little waylaid by plot matters in its midsection, especially whenever it drags poor aggrieved Mr. MacDougal back into the mix, but from about the time Lou finds himself sitting in Frankenstein's lap counting the number of hands in front of him, it becomes a perfect model in how to properly blend horror and comedy - particularly the breakneck multi-level final chase sequence extending from Lou on the gurney to the dock catching fire, which is an astonishingly sustained object lesson on how to wring the maximum amount of action from a given scenario.

What catches me this time around is how simple most of the gags are - the punchline to the barricaded door, for instance, or the quick gag that pops when Lou is told to turn to the left while running. Maybe my favorite joke in the whole film is another simple bit of business that meshes the urgency of the situation with a burlesque-hall-broad aim to please: Lou is running from the Frankenstein monster. sees a tablecloth with which he can attempt a ruse and yanks it out from under the glassware on top of it, at which point he briefly breaks the fourth wall and shoots the audience a lopsided grin as if to say, "Hey, it worked!" It's an old gag, but properly utilized it's still funny. Pare the elaborate constructions down to their elemental parts and the jokes are simple, silly and effective. The old classics still kill.

5: Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1953, Charles Lamont)

Owned release: The 2008 Universal A&C box previously discussed. This is on disc 13.

Acquired: Feb. 2013 from Amazon.

Seen before?: Once from this disc - July 17th, 2017. I gave it three-and-a-half stars then, and I can no longer explain why.

In regards to second-handedness as discussed in my last review... there's always the danger of going too far with it. What starts as well-practiced and comfortable can instead begin to feel tired and shopworn.So it goes with this late entry, which tonally is cut from the same cloth as the great ...Meet Frankenstein - it clearly intends to be both a fun comedic romp and a thrilling horror film. But it's all aftermarket parts that have already been worn down to the nub. 

If anything, this feels like a modest horror script that was retrofitted to become an A&C vehicle - while the boys show up in the first big setpiece playing cops and get a couple decent laughs, they're essentially incidental to the major action (a brawl between suffragettes and chauvinists), and they don't become important to the film until 20 minutes have already elapsed. Said time is spent setting up an elaborate plot involving a young suffragette/dance-hall girl, a newspaper reporter who falls for her and the brilliant-but-mad Doctor Jekyll (played by Boris Karloff) who has been her guardian since her youth and is also in love with her... yet while both the fact of her political activism and her place of employment have a goodly amount of screentime lavished upon them, once A&C become the focus these facts are meaningless and change nothing about the stock damsel-in-distress character she becomes. A&C's characters, in a fit of imagination, are named Slim and Tubby. Karloff, who excelled at playing conflicted and sympathetic monsters, here does what he can with a stock evil jerk who bears no resemblance to Stevenson. The general feel here is a film far too large for its programmer-sized container, so instead of letting laughs and scares build organically and breathe, it's consistently tossing things out with a distracted eye on the next three things it has to do, thereby not noticing the thudding sounds of flubbed jokes.

In this wasteland, there are small pleasures to be mined - Lou getting to do a little graceful soft-shoe, an unexpected musical number in the opening sequence, Bud muttering, "Your hat's dirty" in preparation for a well-timed whack to Lou's head. Additionally, Lamont uses the genre to his advantage in terms of shot selection - his direction, typically workmanlike in most spots, does find a number of appropriately evocative and moody images, whether the opening shot of London just choked with fog or this lovely bit of shadow play executed like a live-action Looney Tune:

But really, this is just me searching for marginalia to figure what impressed me so much about it on first go. I guess I must have been in a giddy, forgiving mood. Because what we have here is the kind of movie that devises a sequence where Lou is turned into a giant mouse, and the only good chuckle it gets from that is ten minutes later when Bud finds a bottle of Moselle wine and assumes it's the brew that turned Lou into a rodent ("Mouse-elle!") And let's be honest - that's just me finding uncommon amusement at a wine-nerd joke.

4: Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion (1950, Charles Lamont)

Owned release: The 2008 Universal A&C box. This is on disc 11.

Acquired: Feb. 2013, Amazon.

Seen before?: Once from this disc - June 26, 2017.

Lotta creak and lotta corn in this one - the thing about the Charles Lamont A&C films (as opposed to say, the Charles Barton films, which feel a bit tighter on the whole) is that they seem to wear their second-handedness without shame. Lamont is under no illusions about what's being made here, and he's trusting the expertise of his stars to put over a script that mostly contains everything you'd expect from a first draft whose parameters contain "Foreign Legion," "desert" and "Arabs." It's a weak adventure B-picture that just happens to have two extremely funny people wandering through it, laying waste to everything they touch. This is tweaked by the opening narration, which begins with grand pomposity, rhapsodizing about the merciless desert sun and the brave men of the Foreign Legion, before deflating to mention two boys "the Foreign Legion would like to forget."

A famous George Carlin bit has him arguing that anything can be made funny, and while he was talking about offensive or shocking humor, the same can be said about the sort of boilerplate concepts on display in Foreign Legion. It's about committing to the bit - the mirage bit, for instance, probably played flat on paper, but when you mix in Lou's four-stage disbelief at the ice cream soda in front of him, or the brief attempt to sit back down on the missing stool in hopes that it will rematerialize, or Bud's ecstatic reverie upon finding an actual oasis... well, it kills. Lou misfiring a machine gun could in theory be good for a couple chuckles, but the bit runs and runs, gathering more absurdity with each passing minute, turning it into a gleeful dose of destructive anarchy. There's fewer laughs in the material involving the Arab villains, mostly from the necessity of having to keep an element of danger in the narrative (and also, yeah, kinda racist), but even so there's some amusing flourishes of marginalia, like the emcee at the slave-trade auction descending into pure auctioneer gibberish or the His and multiple Hers towels briefly glimpsed as a background gag in the climax as the boys drive a car through a harem bath. They're dumb jokes, but they work because the involved parties were committed to them.

Here's where the canniness comes in - "selling the bit" is also the whole point of the narrative. The story hinges on A&C's involvement in a crooked wrestling scam run by a Mafioso type. The conflict arises when one of the wrestlers, an enormous man-mountain named Abdullah the Assassin, refuses to commit to the bit he's signed on for and lose to his opponent. He then buggers off back home to Algiers, and the boys have to follow him at the behest of the Mafioso, who has a lot of money riding on the match. After a series of misadventures, they fall into the clutches of an evil sheik who is also of course a cousin to Abdullah. Bud and Lou are sentenced to be torn limb from limb by the sheik's wrestlers, Abdullah and another fellow played by Tor Johnson, but Abdullah reveals to Lou that he's ready to go back to America and will help them escape by rigging the wrestling match - by deciding, at last, to sell the bit that he couldn't bring himself to do before. That commitment to wholehearted fakery in the name of entertainment saves the day, even as the ruse that saves the day - the "Boston routine" - is a cheap and obvious ploy. The people making these films... they were smart cookies in my opinion.

Also, there is a catfish who wears false teeth and spits water in Lou's face. Just felt like that needed to be mentioned.

3: Abbott and Costello Go to Mars (1953, Charles Lamont)

Owned release: Included as part of the Complete Universal Pictures set released by Universal in 2008 (the one in the big stupid box that looks like a steamer trunk and has a top-open lid on which the hinges split at the slightest provocation, not the currently available version released later that replaced the box with a slipcover). This film is on Disc 13 (of 15).

Acquired: February of 2015 from Amazon.

Seen before?: Once from this disc - June 13, 2017.

It's an interesting thing doing this alphabetically - there are certain things I know I'm going to have to skip around on (I recently watched Ginger knowing I'll be tackling The Abductors within the next week or two, and I wouldn't dream of watching Aparajito before watching Pather Panchali), but other films I feel all right taking out of order. Like, for instance, this Abbott & Costello box set. Going alphabetically means I'll be dealing with the later films, generally considered their weakest work, before getting to the stuff that made them big. While there's no issues of continuity between these films, obviously, there is part of me that wonders if I'm not more affectionate towards the films I've seen from them so far because of that lack of historical perspective - since I haven't seen the earlier films, I can't tell what's been reused, which routines are old hat, which gags have had better (or, to be fair, worse) effect elsewhere... essentially, I'm coming to these films sans context. The booklet that comes with the box set notes when certain famous routines are used in certain films, and Mars does have one specific routine - "Venusian Balloons" - that is a rewrite of an earlier bit, "Tree of Truth," that cropped up in 1942's Pardon My Sarong. Would I find the rendition of the bit here less amusing if I was familiar with the earlier iteration? (It's isn't that sharp anyway, so maybe it's a moot point.)

The interesting thing in that regard is that A&C clearly know that, since they'd been grinding out these films for over a decade (and for years before that as a stage & radio team), and as such the overelaborate plot makes room for two escaped convicts whose main purpose is to facilitate a mistaken identity switch on the boys when the convicts rob a bank. The joke, of course, is that these two have the same look and dynamic as the leads, right down to the big dopey one using the catchphrase, "I am with you." Though the best setpiece is the delightful slow-motion sequence in space, the New Orleans segment, where A&C mistakenly believe themselves to be on Mars, is on the whole the funniest section of this extremely episodic film, offering gags both silly (the convicts using a ray gun to freeze bank employees, including one guy in the middle of drinking from a water fountain) and surreal ("I broke the girl in half!"). It kinda falls flat once they get to Venus (not Mars - truth in advertising took a sleep here) and deal with the all-female, all-swimsuit model society that lives there, but even the weakest material is well-sold by the leads, as smooth and professional a comedy team as any that ever worked. Their chemistry and easy rapport wrings laughs from even the dumbest wordplay ("What makes a balloon go up?" "Hot air." "Then what's keepin' you down?") and Costello's reactions in particular create extra punchlines that kill even when the scripted ones fall flat. (When Costello spots one of the convicts for the first time, seeing him only from behind in his prison stripes, the laugh doesn't come when he describes him as "a zebra without any tail" - it's a bit earlier when he emits this two-stage gulped shriek that sounds like he's trying to scream inward down his own throat.) They made funnier films - I've seen some of them already - but there's value in seeing the wonders great comedians can do with middling material. So am I laughing at this stuff because I don't know exactly how second-hand it is, or am I laughing just because Abbott and Costello were funny guys and if they do reuse material, there's not much difference between that and a rewatch of a favorite comedy?

Note of interest #1: In a film so wrapped in flight and space travel, it's a knowing gag that has the first shot of the film be a toy glider in the air being piloted by Costello's character. Whose name is Orville.

Note of interest #2: A laugh that exists now  in a way it wouldn't have before - when Costello asks the queen of Venus about the possibility of getting a nice juicy steak, she explains that they have food pills instead, then pauses a beat and says, "We have pills for everything." I imagine the innuendo was intended even back in 1953, but post-Viagra, there's an extra edge there. Especially since that society hadn't seen a man in 400 years.

2: The Abberdine County Conjuror (2006, Jeff Cooper)

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