You won't be disappointed!

Surprisingly incoherent and boring

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

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.

"With times as tough as they are," intones the narrator, "we present our formula for the cheapest kind amusement: nightmares." We see an unkempt man in some kind of 19th century get-up—coat, vest, a black tie with an enormous bow—eating lobster, drinking milk and reading "Dracula." "We've all heard of the worm that turned," says the narrator. "But this is the bookworm that turned. Inside out." When the man has a feeling that's a "cross between delirium tremens and the seven year itch" he's ready for his nightmare."A good nightmare always begins with a dark cellar and a coffin," he continues. As the dream progresses, we see that it consists of footage from "Nosferatu" (1922), "Frankenstein" (1931) and "The Cat Creeps" (1930). The footage is spliced together to make Dracula and Frankenstein's monster appear to be sharing the same rooms. For comic effect some footage is repeated several times, or run backwards and then forwards again. Dracula's caretaker crawls up and down the stairs over and over: "It looks as though he's having his ups and downs. He acts like Congress and always ends up where he started. This exercise is good for water on the knee, water on the brain and other naval diseases. It is also a good way to enjoy the jitters without drinking alcohol." The narrator pities the man: "If I were in his place I'd resign—or at least quit." He describes Dracula's entrance: "So Dracula comes up close and shows us what the well-dressed ghost is wearing. He throws his silhouette on the wall, and the wall is so scared it looks as if it's plastered."And now the blood may spurt any minute." He adds dryly: "Gush, gush."Dracula departs: "So he decides to go back to his coffin and sleep for a hundred years until Congress decides to do something about the Depression."Frankenstein's Monster enters and "starts to look for trouble. There's so much trouble around these days, he shouldn't have any trouble finding it." The Monster dithers: "He can't decide which way to go. He's like a woman automobile driver."The Monster watches Dracula (actually the costumed villain from "The Cat Creeps") steal a diamond necklace off a sleeping woman, studying the vampire's "tesh-nee-kyoo." (I had to replay that a couple times: it's a cutesy pronunciation of "technique.")The short ends with the Monster reaching toward the heavens, where we cut back to the new footage and see the frightened dreamer sitting on a chandelier. "And the moral of this story is: you can milk a cow, but a lobster is very ticklish."This film is a very close imitation of the specialty shorts Pete Smith was making for MGM: silent footage narrated with wisecracks. Even Smith's narrating voice—nasally, dry, sarcastically gee-whiz—is mimicked. Why does this Carl Laemmle-produced film use clips from the 1922 "Nosferatu," rather than Laemmle's own "Dracula"? Maybe because unlike Bela Lugosi, the German vampire was ugly: "There's the profile that has won first prize in all the ghost beauty contests. When Dracula was born, his mother took one look at that face and had herself arrested. A guy with a face like Dracula must be a spook, or he'd have his face lifted. And the worst of it is, this spook looks screwy—and there's nothing screwier than a screwy spook."Hear the rim shots? "The caretaker decides that he might have been seeing things. Maybe his near beer was nearer than he thought." How about now?However unfashionable the jokes, I laughed at some of them. And we can be grateful "Boo" preserves the only known surviving footage from "The Cat Creeps." Think your favorite movies will last forever? Boo!

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).

As time passes, it is easy to forget that films of the past were often accompanied by co-features, newsreels, cartoons and film shorts that added to the value of an evening out. Even if the main feature was a desultory effort, entertainment could be found within the accompanying program.Dating from 1932, Boo was a short film produced by Universal that used footage from their own Frankenstein adaption, as well as The Cat Creeps and the 1922 German version of Dracula entitled Nosferatu. With minimal new footage but clever editing, a modest yet enjoyable short was produced. Given that the film incorporates only around three minutes of new footage, production was likely limited to a single day.Clearly a product of its time (with brisk narration bemoaning the depression and Congress' failure to deal with it), this film was likely a tolerable indulgence for film goers of the time but has become an intriguing relic of its time for the modern viewer.On a side note, Nosferatu was ordered destroyed by Bram Stoker's widow shortly after its unauthorised production. Several prints survived and it is intriguing that a relatively clear one was available for the producers of Boo as early as 1932. With so much of film history prior to 1950 now lost to us, the survival of Boo and its public distribution with the Frankenstein DVD provide us with an item of historical and social interest. It provides an indication of how modest resources could be used to pad out a cinema program and perhaps more importantly shows the cultural impact of Frankenstein at that time. The monster was an easily recognisable figure already and would not have been included in the short had the public not been able to instantly identify him.Seeing a film like Boo is like opening a door to the past. Even after the door has closed the memories remain and new insight is gained by the viewer.