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.
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