Abbott and Costello meet the Killer Boris Karloff (1949)

Okay guys this is the first of my Abbott and Costello reviews for Gutmunchers.  I’ve always been a huge fan of these movies and decided when I started the website I would at some point review all of them that I wanted to.  This time around Abbott plays Casey the house detective of the Lost Caverns Hotel, and Costello is the bumbling (of course) bellboy Freddie.  The action starts when a big shot lawyer shows up wanting to meet with the owner of the hotel.  Before you know it Freddie is fired when the lawyer complains about him and then promptly ends up dead!  So of course the police think that he did it.  That is until they realize that several of his high profile clients are at the hotel and that he had invited them all there. 

They just don’t make them like this anymore.  Sure the movie follows a fairly established formula that consists of a serious mystery with dead bodies piling up and mixes in some slapstick comedy.  But I don’t think that anyone had the formula down quite as well as Abbott and Costello did.  One of the things that they did well was allow others to handle the serious stuff and stick to the comedy.  Here they assemble a great cast, including Boris Karloff, to play the heavies.  This allows them to basically do their own thing in the other scenes.  So you can have Karloff sneaking around menacingly, while in the next scene the boys are trying to get rid of a laundry basket full of bodies.  This willingness of sharing the spotlight with others is what sets them aside from many of the other comedy teams. 

Before I go any further I did want to mention the great job that Karloff does in this movie.  As I’ve already stated he is quite creepy and convincing in his role as the Swami, but what might surprise many Karloff fans is how well he plays the straight man to Costello.  There is a sequence where he is trying to get Freddie to kill himself where it is just Karloff and Costello on screen and they have a really funny chemistry that surprised me.  There are a couple of other really funny bits here including a classic with a candle and a turtle, as well as the previously mentioned laundry basket full of bodies. 

If you haven’t ever seen an Abbott and Costello movie, or just haven’t watched one since you were a kid I think you should give one a chance.  They really are quite funny and I think that while a bit dated and silly they do hold up pretty well.  Plus too much serious horror, blood, and guts can get depressing and a good laugh is sometimes just what you need.  I recommend Abbott and Costello as one of the better movies they did and one that might appeal to horror fans. 

3 out of 4

reviewed by John Shatzer

© Copyright 2010 John Shatzer