The Boogie Man Will Get You

Dir. Lew Landers 66 Minutes

USA

1942

Starring: Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, Miss. Jeff Donnell, Maxie Rosenbloom, Larry Parks

***/***** In their first collaboration following the silly Kay Kyser old dark house comedy You'll Find Out, The Boogie Man Will Get You again features Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre using their classic screen horror personas to silly effect in a picture that moves fast, packs quite a bit in its slim narrative, and is consistently entertaining if ultimately a bit slight. Karloff is, again, in a mad scientist role, using the bodies of traveling salesmen to experiment in his work to create a superhuman. Suffering from debt, he sells his house to a young, recently separated woman (Jeff Donnell, curiously billed as Miss Jeff Donnell) who intends on using the place to build a hotel, under the condition that he and his completely batty housekeeper can remain on the property. Things get complex when her desperate, estranged human arrives looking for reconciliation, and when another doctor who doubles as the town sheriff (Peter Lorre) discovers, and decides to go along with, Karloff's plot. 

The hotel subplot allows for a wide ensemble of grotesques to make their way through the narrative, including a choreographer and an insane drifter from the Italian army, all inadvertently standing in the way of Karloff and Lorre's deeds. But it also gives the picture quite a bit of variety, because even at a mere sixty-six minutes the story dangerously veers towards running out of steam. The best humor comes when Karloff and Lorre poke fun at the characteristics that made them so popular (Lorre producing a giant gun from his pocket is a real treat), and less so when it goes for broad, slapstick touches. But it is a fun time on the whole, allowing the pair to adjust to a rapidly waning interest in the horror genre and applying it to a more humorous realm (and far more efficiently done than the aforementioned Kyser picture). A nice piece of entertainment for fans of the genre of the era.

October 19th, 2019