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.
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