Abbott and Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff
Reviewed by Edward Larsen Terkelsen

USA, NR, 84 m, 1949
Directed by Charles Barton. Stars Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Boris Karloff, et al.

Abbott and Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff is the only A&C picture that allows for a co-star’s name to appear next to Bud and Lou’s in the title. But Karloff’s role in this comic whodunit amounts to little more than an extended cameo, and what’s even more puzzling is that he doesn’t play the titular assassin. He plays Swami Talpur, a turbaned hypnotist from Brooklyn who checks into Crandall’s Lost Cavern Hotel, a rather frou-frou joint (complete with mineral baths and European cuisine) that’s apparently so hard up for help that it keeps a ham-fisted, Weeble-shaped oaf named Freddie (Lou Costello) around to schlep the tenants’ bags. After accidentally injuring one of the hotel’s most valued customers, Amos Strickland (Nicholas Joy), a cantankerous criminal lawyer, Freddie is given his walking papers. Exasperated, Freddie gets all up in Strickland’s grill and hollers, “Every dog has its day and I’ll have mine!” (The threat is punctuated by a woof.) When the mouthpiece turns up deader than Kelsey’s nuts, Freddie naturally becomes the chief suspect. For whatever reason, the hotel has its own in-house detective, Casey (Bud Abbott), who is also Freddie’s cousin and thus disposed to give him the benefit of the doubt. As Casey and Freddie creep about the hotel in search of clues that will clear Freddie’s name, other corpses turn up—and always in places that will lead to Freddie getting fingered as the killer. There’s some ghoulish fun in watching A&C struggle to hide the bodies from the inn’s Nosey Parkers: Disguised as a cleaning lady, Freddie wheels a laundry cart full of stiffs to an entertainment room where he and Casey arrange their rotting subjects around a card table in a tableau that evokes a specially contemplative game of bridge. (The comic stakes are raised when Percy Helton appears as a very lonely and very randy clerk who is fooled by Freddie’s masquerade and tries to steal a little “smack.”) Sometime later (or sometime before—I don’t remember; things tend to jump around quite a bit here), Swami Talpur sneaks into Freddie’s room while he’s sawing logs and gives him a hypnotic suggestion to do himself in. Of course, it doesn’t work (a readied noose can’t support the weight of Freddie’s, er, ample frame), but given the film’s resolution, which disputes Talpur’s involvement with any of the murders, the scene makes no sense. There are other red herrings, such as mysteriously lit guests (including a smoke-enshrouded femme fatale) who emerge occasionally from their rooms to exchange knowing glances. Many of these folks were former clients of Strickland, who was planning on writing his memoirs, so you might surmise that he was the victim of a conspiracy to keep him from disclosing any potentially embarrassing information. But wouldn’t the attorney-client privilege forbid such a thing? It doesn’t really matter; any theory you come up with is going to be dashed by an explanation in the final reel that appears to have been pulled right out of screenwriter Hugh Wedlock, Jr.’s ass. 

Up until its groaner of a twist ending, Abbott and Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff is a compelling (though not particularly funny) ode to the murder mystery genre. There are more than a few intriguing pieces to its jigsaw puzzle of a plot; you can’t help but look forward to finding out how they’ll all fit together. But, alas, those pieces are about as ill-fitting as a pair of Jeremy Gillitzer’s slacks on Manuel Uribe. The movie’s big revelation is a big cheat, and it renders everything that precedes it as meaningless. (After wasting an hour or better of my life in trying to figure the blasted thing out, I feel my desire to lob a beefsteak tomato at the screen wasn’t so out of line.) Was the ending hastily rewritten at the eleventh hour to placate disappointed preview audiences, or did the knuckleheads in charge figure that a send-up of the murder mystery didn’t need to adhere to the rules of the game? It’s hard to say, but the brainless dénouement nearly spoils the film. Still, there’s some good stuff to be had here and there: a nifty animated title sequence with Costello dodging bullets and one very big knife, Charles Van Enger’s flowing black and white photography, and a bravo piece of sustained physical comedy staged in a deep cavern. Abbott and Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff might’ve become a pop classic on the order of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein if it hadn’t botched its ending. As it is, though, I think it’s on the same level as Africa Screams (which was also directed by The Killer’s Charles Barton) or High Society or Hit the Ice. Amusing but inconsequential. 

July 22, 2009

© Copyright 2009 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.