The Boogie Man Will Get You: 6 out of 10: If Ma and Pa Kettle ever did Arsenic and Old Lace it would be this movie. Very very silly and occasionally quite funny the Boogie Man has a couple of big faults. The supporting cast is mixed at best and the ending is a mess.

It also has two great assets, Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre. Karloff is spot on as the bumbling well meaning murdering scientist. Whose experiments on traveling salesman to create super-soldiers for the war effort are both well meaning and quite homicidal.

Peter Lorre is hilarious as the Mayor, Police Chief, Undertaker, Notary, excreta. He dresses in a three piece suit with a Siamese kitten in his pocket to which he coos in German.

Watching these two together is pure entertainment and certainly worth a viewing. The rest of the movie is light, frothy, derivative, and occasionally irritating. Just watch the stars at work and forget the rest.

I couldn't wait to see this film. After all, it starred Boris Karloff and he's one of my favorites. Imagine my surprise, then, when instead of the typical horror film it turned out this was supposed to be a screwball comedy. I say "supposed to" because the film just wasn't funny.

The film takes place in a rotting old Colonial home that's being turned into an inn. The lady who just bought the place knows nothing about running a hotel and she agreed to let the old owner (Karloff) continue to live there and conduct his experiments in the basement. However, she does not know that the experiments have already killed four traveling salesmen and Karloff doesn't seem particularly alarmed about this. Later, the town's big-shot (Peter Lorre) finds out about it but instead of arresting him (since he's, among other things, the sheriff),he quickly goes into business with Karloff. Then, unexpectedly, other people start to die and disappear and all sorts of kookiness ensues.

In so many, many ways this film is a bad knockoff of ARSENIC AND OLD LACE--which had been a very successful play for several years and was wonderfully filmed in late 1941 (though shelved until the play ended in 1944). In fact, both Karloff and Lorre were associated with the production (Lorre was in the film and Karloff was in the Broadway play). In many other ways THE BOOGIE MAN is a blatant ripoff of ARSENIC AND OLD LACE--such as the dead bodies in the basement, the disappearing body, Lorre being a doctor (in addition to being a sheriff and several other jobs),etc.. The big difference, however, is that THE BOOGIE MAN is totally unfunny from start to finish due to having absolutely no pacing or decent writing. Instead of subtle or clever (like ARSENIC),the film just comes off as very abrasive and loud and more like a Three Stooges film than anything else. Considering it was made by Columbia Pictures (home of the Stooges),this isn't all that surprising. What is surprising is that Karloff would allow himself to be in such a dreadful film. In fact, I might go so far as to say that this is possible Karloff's worst film of the 1940s--though a few of his later films are significantly worse (if that's possible),such as GHOST IN THE INVISIBLE BIKINI and CAULDRON OF BLOOD.

Watch only if you have a very strong stomach and a very, very low sense of humor. If you like the Stooges' shorts, this film might still not be sophisticated enough for you as the average Stooge short is like Shakespeare compared to THE BOOGIE MAN. Wow that's one hour of my life I'll never be able to get back--thanks Columbia!

So new Innkeeper Jeff Donnell must do when she purchases a Revolutionary War era inn from the wacky scientist Boris Karloff who has more cobwebs in his brain than the inn's attic does. Boris is trying to create an army of supermen to battle Hitler and Mussolini, and this leads behind a trail of corpses, so when he gets the opportunity to stop focusing on running the inn and work on his patriotic goal, he takes it on. The local sheriff/D.A./notary public (Peter Lorre) is equally as nutty, keeping a Siamese kitten in his pocket which can smell a corpse in another room. This feline Charlie Chan stumbles upon a body with a knife in it, and the presence of a series of other wackos (macho powder puff salesman Maxie Ronenbloom, housekeeper Maude Eburne and Donnell's paranoid fiancée amongst them) keeps things popping'.

What could have been a very enjoyable "B" comedy turns out to be a cheap rip-off of "Arsenic and Old Lace" with Karloff and Lorre taking over the roles of the two old ladies who poisoned their gentlemen callers with elderberry wine. Karloff, who played a villain in that play on Broadway, wasn't able to do the movie, so he got this second feature instead, and while there are some enjoyable moments, it's all pretty silly stuff, a comedy horror spoof which focuses on juvenile style gags for laughs and seems more suited to the likes of Columbia's other comic talents, Joe E. Brown and the Three Stooges. This doesn't make much of an impact in the career of its two horror icon stars, so the result is something you can take or leave, but like certain foods, will leave you hungry for more only a short time later.