Africa Screams (1949)

I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

best movie i've ever seen.

A Masterpiece!

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Bud and Lou are up to their necks in the jungle where peril is rife at every turn. It's standard fare for the boys this one, though some strong scenes induce the laughter that the viewers are looking for. Plot is a sort of Tarzan Meets King Kong And King Solomon's Mines, with animals, cannibals and diamonds ago go. The usual rules apply, Lou is constantly under threat and offering up cowardly reactions, while Bud is calm and manages to avoid the tricky situations. As a formula it works to an extent, but as always with Abbott and Costello movies it's best not to watch too many in one sitting due to the repetitive nature of their material. Joining the lads for this one is Clyde Beatty, Frank Buck, Max Baer, Buddy Baer and Hillary Brooke. 6/10

May be the best Abbott and Costello movie. At least in my opinion. It is so funny. The whole film is funny from beginning to end. Lou is the cowardly foil to Bud's scheme to extort money from the people who want to find diamonds in Africa. Jack Buck and Clyde Beatty, both very famous big game hunters and trappers in their time, have small roles in this movie. After trekking through the jungle for a while they come to the diamond fields. Here there are diamonds laying all over the ground, Haha. Lou is wanted by the local cannibals but manages to not get eaten. He also comes across Bud's hidden bag of diamonds and takes them. In the end Bud leaves Lou to fend for himself. They both make it back to NYC but in a switch Bud is the flunky elevator operator and Lou owns a huge sky scraper along with his partner, a gorilla.

When I was a youngster, many moons ago, no screen comedians tickled my funny bone more than Abbott and Costello. Be it on film or their "Abbott and Costello Show" on TV (repeats of this 1952-'54 program ran in NYC throughout the '60s for we baby boomers), the team could do no wrong for me. Forty years later, however, I find that A&C have lost much of their sparkle and charm, although the best of the films--such as "Buck Privates," "Keep 'Em Flying," "Pardon My Sarong" and of course "A&C Meet Frankenstein"--remain wonderful entertainments for me. The team does not seem to have aged as well as some others; I find the silent clowns (Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd) and the Marx Brothers, Laurel & Hardy, W.C. Fields, and the Stooges far funnier, somehow, today. A recent first viewing of the A&C film "Africa Screams," released in 1949, has only served to bolster my opinion here. This is a remarkably stoopid film, made on the supercheap, that is fairly consistently UNfunny, despite a terrific cast. In this one, Lou plays a salesman of safari books, and his character goes by the name of Stanley Livington (oy). His buddy, Buzz Johnson (Abbott), convinces pretty Diana Emerson (Hillary Brooke) that Stanley is a big-game hunter and safari guide (even though Stanley had previously confessed that as a child he was scared by his piggy bank, and that he was 15 before he ate his first animal cracker...double oy!), and so off go the three (along with Diana's thuggish accomplices, played by real-life boxing brothers Max and Buddy Baer) to hunt for the Orangutan gargantua in the African jungle. But wait...what the boys don't know is that Diana is actually an unscrupulous diamond hunter! (This last is not really a spoiler; this movie was BORN spoiled!)Anyway, baby boomers who grew up loving the sweet and lovely Hillary Brooke on "The A&C Show" may be surprised to see her portray a "bad girl" here, but actually, Hillary had been known for playing bad girls for many years (check her out in 1944's "Ministry of Fear" or 1946's "Strange Impersonation" for proof). She manages to escape from this wholly unfunny wreck with her dignity fairly intact. Real-life lion tamer Clyde Beatty is in the film (his scenes with the big cats ARE pretty darn impressive), as is real-life big-game hunter Frank "Bring 'Em Back Alive" Buck, and they too emerge likable and unscathed. Not so for then-current Stooge Shemp Howard, playing a Mr. Magoo type, or for future Stooge Joe Besser (playing Diana's butler and doing, essentially, a warm-up performance for his Stinky Davis character on "The A&C Show" a few years later). "Africa Screams," incidentally, marked the first time that A&C, Brooke and Besser worked as a team, and is the only time that Shemp and Besser appeared together.As may be expected, the film dishes out all kinds of shenanigans with lions, crocodiles, zany monkeys, "Umgawa"-spouting cannibals, and the seemingly inevitable man in a gorilla suit; you can doubtless imagine. Instances of extreme stoopidity include that ridiculous native chant, Stanley's use of an egg beater as a ship propeller, and the film's protracted ending, during which A&C, Diana and her thugs, cannibals, monkeys and that darn gorilla chase each other through the jungle. Homages to then-recent films "Mighty Joe Young" and "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" fail to engender any laffs, either. Actually, I only chuckled three or four times during the course of this 79-minute film, but they were more chuckles of disbelief at the inanity on screen than chuckles of actual mirth. AND, strange to say, Bud struck me as more amusing than Lou in this outing. Go figure. Truly, "Africa Screams" is a movie for hard-core A&C historians only, and possibly kids up to age 6 (and even THEY might be rolling their eyes). The lousy print quality of this Westlake Video DVD doesn't help matters, either. Y'know, it just struck me that this film makes the 1963 Bob Hope vehicle "Call Me Bwana" look like high art! To quote Buzz, as he watches Stanley jump into a crocodile-infested river: "What a belly flop!"

This movie is of special interest to me as a Three Stooges fan, in that it features not one but two actors who were part of the Stooges at one time or other, Joe Besser and Shemp Howard. Joe, almost universally regarded as the least funny of all who were ever part of the trio, was the only member to have a more successful comedy career apart from the Stooges than with. Shemp, despite sometimes being compared unfavorably with his brother Curly, was a solid member of the trio for 10 years, while his career apart from the Stooges never really amounted to much.In this movie we see both of those realities at work. Joe is, in a word, hilarious, and steals virtually every scene he is in. It's not much of a stretch to say that this is as much his movie as Bud's and Lou's. Shemp, on the other hand, plays a nearsighted buffoon, and his performance is nothing more than a running gag that involves him repeatedly running into things, which quickly grows tiresome.Seeing Joe Besser's comedic talents on display here (as well as in other settings, like the post-Stooges Joey Bishop Show), leaves one marveling at how one so hilariously funny could have flopped so completely as a Stooge. Whereas Shemp will always be remembered as one of the Three Stooges and nothing else, and his performance in this movie does nothing to change that.