Boo (1932)

Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

A purportedly "funny" short. It uses footage from the silent "Nosferatu", Universal's 1931 "Frankenstein" and "The Cat Creeps". It shows these various monsters terrifying people as they do things. The narration is lame...very VERY lame! It's all supposed to be funny but it's not. The lines are supposed to be humorous but they're downright embarrassing. There's not one even remotely funny joke here and they're taking vicious jabs at the monsters themselves. To make matters worse they are CONSTANTLY repeating the same footage again and again and AGAIN until you're ready to scream. Each time it's introduced with some more terribly unfunny jokes. This is real cringe-inducing that is just insulting to horror fans and painfully unfunny to everybody. Universal should have kept this buried in its vaults.

. . . knowing that with today's copyright laws designed to make rich people richer and put gazillions of bucks into lawyers' pockets from the scant savings of ordinary people and entrepreneurs, he could have SUED Universal Studios for COPYING HIS VOICE and speaking cadence in this 9 minute, 29.9-second horror movie spoof, BOO! (think an ancient template for the SCARY MOVIE franchise)? Under current law, anyone with the money for legal fees (think rich people and their corporations) can trademark catch phrases such as "Please!" or "Holy cow!" as well as ANY distinctive speech variation that deviates from a flat monotone as well as any jumble of letters forming a made-up syllable as well as any quirky body movement such as the "moonwalk" as well as any musical combination of two notes or more as well as most of the first names in the baby moniker tomes (think "Cher" or "Madonna") as well as any line of computer code AND SUE THE PANTS OFF any college kid's parents if the kid has any access to computers! Further, Hollywood has single-handedly gotten what was already an arguably too generous copyright period--originally 28 years--extended to 88 years and counting!! That's the irony of BOO!--Hollywood would not dare to make it today, due to its own crazy rules designed to terrorize the rest of us!

The main reason this seems so unfunny to many younger viewers is that a lot of the humor was topical, and topical humor becomes unfunny as soon as the topic is no longer "current events"--how funny will "Dubya" jokes seem by around 2084, when they'll be about as old as the jokes in "Boo!"? I'm twenty-some years younger than "Boo!", and the only reason I got most of the topical jokes is that I'm a big fan of 1930s movies thanks to having grown up when TV stations showed movies late at night instead of infomercials (yes, kids, they really used to do that!) You miss a lot of the humor in older movies if you can't time-travel between the ears.

I've just come across Boo as an extra on the DVD of Frankenstein (1931) and, due to the fact I was watching it at well past midnight, I found it as strange as it was funny. It starts off with a bearded man with a strange expression on his face emerging from a jack-in-the-box and holding up the film's title, which is a weirdly disconcerting effect, particularly as I have no idea who this man was. The narration is rather outdated, not so much because it was recorded in 1932, but because of what is said (the reference to woman automobile drivers is ever so slightly sexist), but what I don't get is, while Universal included footage from its movies 'Frankenstein' and 'The Cat Creeps', the Dracula segments actually come from F.W Murnau's 'Nosferatu'. This seems strange, because I would have thought the studio would want to publicise its own, then-recent, Dracula movie (the one with Bela Lugosi). To conclude, Boo is an oddity that you probably won't find yourself watching unless you get the Frankenstein DVD, which you ought to own anyway