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.

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.