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Brilliant and touching

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

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.

. . . 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.

This is easily one of the better short films I have ever seen. Despite being made in 1932, it's on par with the best of today's equivalent shorts, and far superior to most of them. It's a hilarious spoof that uses clips from Frankenstein (1931) and Nosferatu (1922), along with dead-pan narration, that takes a number of clever shots at everything from their appearance, actions and even congress and The Great Depression. It's everything that Svengoolie tries, and horrendously fails, to be. It's a choice gem of the 1930's culture that should be experienced if at all possible; definitely a must-see for fans of comedy and horror (especially Dracula and Frankenstein).

Yes, you read right. "BOO" (1932) is a delightfully _unfunny_ little movie. How is that possible? Well, the narration is really, painfully lame... so lame, in fact, that it had me laughing hysterically. The narrator is just so darned enthusiastic, so sure he's being delightful, that you have to marvel at his blissful ignorance. After I saw "BOO," I couldn't help but imitate him. ("He's just like Congress!" "He's like a female automobile driver!") Add to this the "wacky" editing tricks -- endlessly repeated -- and you have the recipe for comic perfection. I think if I had seen this when I was 8 years old, I might have thought it was just about the funniest thing in the world. Seeing it as an adult, the movie's UNFUNNINESS is itself funny. It seems like a contradiction in terms, but you'll understand when you see it. You should have the DVD of "Frankenstein" in your collection anyway. Universal's done a beautiful job with it.