The Boogie Man Will Get You (1942)

Like You'll Find Out, I had no prior knowledge of this until I got it in a DVD set, this one being the Boris Karloff: Icons of Horror Collection from Sony, with three other movies. Like the Karloff and Lugosi set I mentioned in that previous review, I got this other set for Christmas one year and was interested in it mainly because it had the movie The Man They Could Not Hang, which I'd learned of during the third CineMassacre's Monster Madness in 2009. I had no knowledge of these other movies, and I especially didn't know what to expect from a movie from the 40's called The Boogie Man Will Get You, which I learned featured not only Karloff but Peter Lorre as well. The artwork on the slim case containing it gave me a little more of an idea, as it showed an apparently befuddled Karloff with white hair and glasses pulled up onto his head, and upon reading the synopsis on the back, I realized it was a horror comedy... and as I learned when I watched it, a really wacky one at that. As with all comedy, whether or not you actually find this movie funny comes down to personal taste but one thing's for sure: it is a nutty little flick, with a whole houseful of quirky characters and a story that grows continuously weird and convoluted as it goes on, to the point where you'll have to turn your brain off for any hope of getting into it. I can't call it one of the best things on either Karloff or Lorre's filmography, nor can I say it's a complete laugh-filled riot, but it's still something to behold simply for how much lunacy they manage to cram into 66 minutes.

The Billings Tavern is an 18th century "historic edifice" in the tiny little town of Jinxville and its owner, the quirky biochemist Prof. Nathaniel Billings, is looking to sell it in order to pay off a slew of mortgage debts. Much to his delight, he gets a buyer in the form of the lovely Winnie Layden, who plans to turn it into a hotel, and agrees to allow him to continue living there until he's completed the experiments he's conducting down in the basement. Said experiments are attempts to find a means of creating powerful supermen for the war effort, but his latest has resulted in the apparent death of the subject, a door-to-door salesman. When Winnie officially buys the tavern and Billings pays off the mortgage to Dr. Arthur Lorentz, the local MD who also serves as the town sheriff, mayor, justice of the peace, and practically every other official capacity, her ex-husband, Bill, who's just been drafted into the army, arrives to stop her from throwing her money away but is too little, too late. Taken aback at the state of the place and how out of the way it is, he's about to leave her flat, when a guest arrives: J. Gilbert Brampton, a choreographer. Bill is shocked when the man agrees to stay there, in spite of how rundown the place is, and when a cupboard nearly falls on Winnie for no reason, he himself decides to stay for a few days to figure out what's going on. He quickly learns how quirky the other residents are, as the chicken-obsessed housekeeper believes she is one while sleepwalking and the farmhand is supposedly friends with the ghost of Uncas, the fabled Last of the Mohicans. Thinking it's part of a scheme to scare off Winnie and make her sell the place back, Bill pokes around and finds his way down into Billings' laboratory, where he sees the body of the salesman he experimented on. He grabs Winnie and the two of them rush to tell Lorentz of this. Lorentz, who's always had it out for Billings due to his bizarre experiments, accompanies them back to the tavern and, going down into the lab, finds Billings looking over the body. Just as he's about to arrest him when he learns this is the latest of five people who've died from his experiments, Billings tells him of his intention and Lorentz, seeing the potential for profit, completely changes his tune, offering to help in any way he can, including finding more human guinea pigs. However, their plans are interrupted by constant surprises like a salesman with a ticklish noggin, a killer roaming the grounds, and an escaped madman planning to blow up a munitions plant.

By the time he did this film, director Lew Landers, who was mostly known for directing westerns, had already worked with Boris Karloff, as well as Bela Lugosi, on one of his earliest directing assignments, the 1935 film, The Raven, and the following year, he would re-team with Lugosi for The Return of the Vampire. Up until 1963's Terrified, his last film released a year after his death, The Return of the Vampire would be the last time he would direct anything that was truly of the horror genre, as he would go on working primarily in westerns, as well as action, adventure, and war movies, although he did do some mystery thrillers around this time, notably 1948's Inner Sanctum, a separate adaptation of the popular book and radio series from the Universal movies starring Lon Chaney Jr. As I said in my review of The Return of the Vampire, Landers also directed a good amount of television during the latter years of his career, doing episodes of shows like The Adventures of Superman, Highway Patrol, Cheyenne, Maverick, and Bat Masterson.

In context of his career at the time, The Boogie Man Will Get You marked the final film in a six-picture deal Boris Karloff had with Columbia and was also meant as a way of cashing in on his recent success with the Broadway play, Arsenic and Old Lace, as the story is very similar. His Prof. Nathaniel Billings has two major concerns: paying off the mortgage debts on the 18th century tavern he lives in, which he's able to when Winnie Layden buys it, and his experiments to create a powerful superman to help with the war effort. Unfortunately, something always seems to go wrong with the latter and his subjects, door-to-door salesmen he figures no one would miss, end up apparently dead. In fact, not long after the movie begins, Billings loses his fifth test subject because he didn't search the man's person for anything that would have interfered with the rays used in the experiments, and eventually has to put the body with the others, which are perfectly preserved due to the effects of the rays, in a makeshift morgue he has hidden behind a wine rack. However, Billings is not portrayed as a villainous mad scientist but rather as a quirky guy whose intentions are noble and who actually tries to accommodate those who "participate" in their experiments, as he seems them as potential martyrs that will go down in history. He even has pity for the all salesmen he uses, sighing, "They never have any friends, poor fellows." That's the thing about Karloff's performance: he ably brings that sense of good intentions while also being terribly misguided and, at the same time, manages to make Billings a very likable guy due to what an oddball he is. He's hardly fazed by everything happening around him, usually having a sighing, "Oh, well," way of looking at things, no matter how macabre or weird they are. When his latest test subject seems to have died, he comments, "Cold as a mackerel. Dear, dear, dear," and when Bill Layden asks him if the ghost of Uncas really is roaming the grounds, he says, "My dear boy, pros and cons of survival after death are so confusing, I prefer not to think about them." And when Dr. Lorentz finds him standing over the recent subject's body and confronts him about it, Billings, despite having a gun pointed at him, says, "Now, doctor, you may not approve of what you choose to call my unorthodox scientific methods... but, surely, you know that I'm no murderer... Let's not split hairs and strain at gnats, now. Of course, I admit I shouldn't have left him lying around, so, if you'll give me a hand, we can put him with the others."

Billings does get some unexpected assistance from Peter Lorre's Dr. Lorentz; unexpected because Lorentz doesn't care for Billings at all, as he disapproves of his strange activities in the cellar and considers him a charlatan, which is why he charges him such high mortgage rates. Having to act as every official in Jinxville, saying that everyone else does little other than vote once a year, Lorentz is a very quirky character himself, always carrying around a little Siamese kitten in his inner coat pocket and often speaking phrases in Latin before translating them. According to Billings and his housekeeper, Amelia, he has no room to talk when he calls Billings a charlatan, as they accuse him of making a fortune off of fake hair tonic. Regardless, Lorentz is more than happy to handle the sale of the tavern to Winnie Layden, and says he'll gladly direct wayfarers in its direction. Later, after Bill Layden finds the body of Billings' latest failed test subject in the basement, he drags Winnie to Lorentz's office and tells him of it. Switching official positions, going from the justice of the peace to the sheriff, Lorentz allows them to take him back to the tavern, where he goes down into the basement and finds Billings standing over the body. When Billings admits the man's demise was his doing, and that he's the fifth in a series of such failures, Lorentz is set to arrest him, when Billings discloses the purpose of his experiments. Realizing the profits that could be made from a means of creating powerful supermen to win the war, he eagerly offers to help him, promising to put any money made into other scientific endeavors and even offers to help fund Billings with some of his own money. After they agree to the partnership, he helps Billings place the body in the hidden room with the others and makes it come off to Winnie that Bill is just off his rocker and imagined he saw a dead person.

At first, Billings and Lorentz contemplate using Bill in their experiments, the latter attempting to knock him unconscious with a whack to the head. When that proves unsuccessful, they instead decided to use another salesman, Maxie, telling him the machine will cure his inferiority complex, but he can't wear the helmet necessary for it because his head is ticklish. They send him to Lorentz's office in town to get some anesthetic, while they check up on one of the

guests, J. Gilbert Brampton, who's snooping around the tavern, as if looking for something. Finding another of the guests murdered in his room, they suspect Brampton and call the police, only for the body to disappear and the disbelieving Winnie and Bill to keep the detained police from coming right away. All the more annoying for them is, when Maxie returns with the anesthetic, he's unable to breathe it in due to sinus problems, and he makes them both sniff it to make sure it's the right stuff, leading them both to pass out. When

they awaken, they find that Winnie and Bill have been knocked out too, and they try to take the opportunity to use Bill, when someone breaks into the cellar, forcing them to hide them. Thinking the intruder is another salesman, they're horrified when he turns out to be an escapee from a prison camp with a backpack full of dynamite and orders them to later drive him to a nearby munitions plant so he can blow it up. It's right then that they get an ample chance to try the experiment on Maxie when he shows back up, hoping he'll become a superman and take care of the madman. By the end of the movie, everyone, including the police, have made their way down into the cellar, where they discover that Billings never killed those he experimented on but put them in a state of suspended animation. Though this will mean advancement in science, Billings is disappointed, saying he had his heart set on creating a superman. On top of that, he and everyone else are about to be sent off to the Idlewild Sanatorium, but Lorentz tells him not to worry, as he's the chairman of the board of directors there.

Winnie Layden (Miss Jeff Donnell) is a bit loose in her shoes as well, as she's willing to spend a crazy amount of money to buy the Billings Tavern in order to turn it into a hotel and is actually happy at the awful condition of the place. Moreover, when the possibility that the ghost of Uncas is roaming the place comes up, Winnie is happy about that, excited that it's such a distinguished ghost to top it all off. She's also willing to allow Prof. Billings to continue living at the tavern and working on his experiments down in the basement, and gives Amelia the housekeeper and Ebeneezer the farmhand the opportunity to stay there as well. When her ex-husband, Bill (Larry Parks), shows up and admonishes her for throwing away her money, she insists she'll prove to him she can run a hotel as good as him, while he feels she's making the latest in a long line of foolish decisions she made throughout their marriage. Having been drafted and heading off to war soon, Bill is determined to set things straight with Winnie, but when the sale of the tavern is finalized, he's about to leave and let her venture fail. He tries to make a point when a guest shows up and he shows him the poor condition the place is in, but when the guy decides to stay there anyway, Bill is totally perplexed. Also, when a cupboard nearly falls on Winnie for no reason, he decides to stay on for a few days to make sure nothing else happens. 

While snooping around the place after dinner, Bill finds his way down to the basement and sees the body of Billings' latest failed test subject. He tells Winnie of it and, in a panic, drags her to Dr. Lorentz's home, getting him to act in his official capacity as sheriff. Unfortunately for Bill, Lorentz decides to aid Billings in his work, helps him hide the body, and denies there ever was one, making him look overexcited and completely crazy, especially to Winnie. Later, after witnessing more

crazy behavior and appalling conditions that about drive him nuts (particularly a disintegrating bed that nearly breaks his back at one point), Bill thinks it's all part of a scheme to scare Winnie off and make her sell the place back cheap after she paid an exorbitant amount for it. The longer the two of them stay there, the more they get caught up in the crazy goings-on, culminating in the two of them unintentionally breathing in some anesthetic that knocks them out and leads to them being placed within the secret room where the other bodies are kept. After escaping it through a secret passage, only to nearly be framed for murder, and end up back down in the cellar to witness Billings' experiments firsthand, Winnie and Bill find themselves about to be taken to Idlewild Sanatorium with everyone else.

Two other screwballs who live on the tavern's property are Amelia (Maude Eburne), the housekeeper, and Ebenezer (George McKay), the farmhand. Amelia is the more overtly kooky of the two, as she writes to a radio show and asks what it would cost to build chicken house for 200 hens, even though she has no chickens whatsoever. She's also seen doing the old cliche of sweeping dirt underneath the rugs, but is very devoted and protective towards Prof. Billings, coming to his

defense when Dr. Lorentz talks bad about him. Most memorably, there's a moment where, as Bill is trying his best to sleep in a bed where the bottom is falling out from under him, Amelia suddenly shows up in the hallway outside his door, scratching and clucking like a chicken, until she walks into the wall, revealing she was sleepwalking. Awakening, she happily tells Bill and Winnie, "Oh, I just laid my 214th egg... I won the prize! I got the Blue Ribbon!" As for Ebenezer, while he appears to be a bit more sane than Amelia, mainly because he actually has pigs to raise, unlike her chickens, he's apparently friends with the ghost of Uncas, who's often heard yelling. Also, at one point, he chases J. Gilbert Brampton onto a haystack with a pitchfork, claiming he sneaked into his barn to try to steal his pigs and that if Uncas hadn't yelled, he would've succeeded. His obsession for his pigs is so great that, when Amelia absentmindedly flings dust and dirt in his face, he's more concerned about it having gotten on the little pig he's carrying. By the end of the movie, it's revealed that both of them are homicidal, as Amelia tried to kill Brampton for his money so she could buy her chicken house, whereas Ebenezer did kill another of the lodgers for money to start a pig farm and hid the body in a closet.

When it becomes clear they're not going to be able to use Bill in the experiment, Billings and Lorentz opt for another salesman, Maxie (Maxie Rosenbloom), who sells powder puffs. In their placating him when they meet him, they agree to buy all of his puffs for $20, the elation of which causes him to faint. They then carry him downstairs in order to put him through the experiment before he awakens, but he regains consciousness while they're searching his person for anything that could interfere with the machine. Explaining that he fainted because his boss said he could never sell anything due to his inferiority complex, Maxie is told that Billings' machine will cure him of said problem. Though he's all for it, he's unable to wear the necessary helmet because he's ticklish on his head. He does agree to take some anesthetic, likening it to a Mickey Finn and saying, "Slip it to me and call me Allowicious," and they send him to Lorentz's house for a bottle of it, while the two of them see what the suspicious Brampton is up to. When he gets back with the bottle, mentioning that he broke the front window because the nurse wasn't there, they hit another snag when they administer the anesthetic, as he has blocked sinuses and can't inhale it. Thinking it may not be the right bottle, he has Billings and Lorentz smell it, only for them to pass out. Panicking, as he thinks he killed them, he runs upstairs, finds Winnie and Bill, and brings them downstairs. He tries to show them what happened, having them inhale from the bottle, causing them to pass out too. Now thinking he's a "wholesale murderer," he runs out of the house, but comes back later and is relieved to see Billings and Lorentz aren't dead, unaware they're being held hostage by a guy who says he's a human bomb. They put Maxie in the machine, knock him out, and put him through the process, but he then appears to die like everyone else. Near the end, when the "human bomb" tries to blow everyone up, Maxie awakens in time to grab the backpack full of dynamite when it's tossed onto him. Drowsily thinking it's his powder puff sample case, he refuses to let go when Bill tries to get rid of it, only for the explosives to fizzle out. It's then revealed that he and the others were put in suspended animation.

The mysterious J. Gilbert Brampton (Don Beddoe) shows up unexpectedly at the tavern right after the sale to Winnie has been finalized and agrees to stay there, despite the condition of the place and the fee being five dollars a day. He claims to be a choreographer who's roaming the American countryside, doing research for a ballet he's about to put on, but he appears to be looking for something at the tavern, as he's doing suspicious things like sneaking into the barn in the middle of the night and knocking the floor underneath the downstairs table. For much of the latter half, Billings and Lorentz believe Brampton to be the one who murdered another lodger, and later, he's seen roaming a secret passageway that leads into Billings' makeshift morgue, ducking back in when Winnie screams upon spotting him. By the time the police finally arrive, Brampton appears to have been murdered himself, but actually only fainted, with a corset he's wearing having deflected a knife sticking in his back. Before pointing out Amelia as the one who tried to kill him, he reveals he's actually the curator of the Historic Society of America and has been snooping about to confirm that the tavern is a historic landmark, one he's prepared to pay $20,000 for.

Near the end of the movie, another man whom Billings and Lorentz believe is a salesman breaks into the basement, but he's actually Jo-Jo (Frank Puglia), an escapee from a Canadian prison camp who plans to blow up a nearby munitions plant. He holds the two of them hostage with a backpack full of dynamite that he threatens to detonate if they don't cooperate, hiding when Maxie comes back downstairs, though he allows them to do their experiment on him, thinking they're "invigorating" his personality, and doing the same when the police and everyone else creep down there at the very end. Once everyone is gathered down in the basement, Jo-Jo lights the fuse and plans to kill everyone, but when the past failed test subjects come wandering in the room, looking like ghosts due to the sheets over them, he panics and tosses the backpack. Nothing happens when the fuse reaches the end, and he's promptly arrested.

Just from the characters alone, you can tell what an out there movie this is, and watching these quirky people interact with each other, while the few truly sane characters, like Bill Layden or the cops who are called to the tavern late in the movie, deal with these weirdos, is where much of the comedy comes from. It works best in the scenes between Prof. Billings and Dr. Lorentz. Be it when they're arguing about each other's questionable scientific and medical credentials, Lorentz is accusing Billings of murder while Billings very calmly tries

to explain himself, or they begin working together, hiding the bodies and trying to get new specimens for the experiments, Karloff and Lorre play off each other really well. The characters of Amelia and Ebenezer, on the other hand, are just baffling, the former for her fixation with getting a house for chickens she doesn't have and the latter for his apparent friendship with a ghost that may or may not be real, makes the eventual reveal that they're both murderers kind of troubling. Speaking of the ghost,

you never get a definitive answer either way, as Billings can't be bothered with the notion of there possibly being one on the property, but one thing's for sure: someone's disembodied voice lets out blood-curdling yells every now and then, and the cupboard almost fell on Winnie for no apparent reason. Then, there's the way Bill contends with this craziness. When he's not dealing with Winnie's half-baked ambitions to turn the rundown tavern into a hotel, he's getting freaked out by Uncas' sudden screaming, finds Amelia scratching

and clucking like a chicken right outside of his bedroom, wherein he has to sleep in a bed that's falling apart, finds a supposed corpse in the basement, only for Billings and Lorentz to deny there ever was one, and so completely loses his mind over that and Ebenezer chasing Brampton around with a pitchfork that he threatens to bash the next troublemaker over the head. Finally, the police officers (one of

whom is played by James C. Morton, who appeared in a number of Three Stooges shorts during this period) have to contend with an overzealous munitions plant guard who shoots one of their tires, calls the tavern to confirm their story of a murder investigation, only for Bill to tell him no murder was committed, and then takes them to speak with the captain. When they finally do arrive, they're able to arrest Amelia and Ebenezer for murder and, in the end, decide to send them all to the nearest insane asylum.

Much like Arsenic and Old Lace, the film relies a lot on black humor, a specific similarity being how it pertains to "corpses" down in the basement, with Billings being constantly disappointed when his machine fails and seemingly kills someone for whatever reason, after which he nonchalantly hides the bodies in his makeshift morgue. There's something darkly funny in how he sees such fatal failures as little more than an infernal nuisance and also his use of salesmen because they don't have that many friends or attachments, something he

pities them for. When he shows Lorentz the room where he keeps the bodies, he points out men who sold various items like alarm clocks, neckties, silk hosiery, and encyclopedias, with Lorentz commenting on the latter two, "He probably didn't have any priority anyway," and, "Oh, I'm sure he didn't mind very much." You also have the two of them initially intending to use Bill in their experiments without asking him, at one point trying to whack him on the head through a secret

panel above his bed, and trying to cajole Maxie and Jo-Jo into taking part, before finding themselves embroiled in a murder mystery all their own when they find the body of one of the guests with a knife in his back. Also, in an interesting twist, they tell Winnie and Bill of that body, only for it to disappear and make Bill seem correct about their being up to something. The movie does have some "old dark house" vibes and gags too, like the secret passageway leading from the morgue

to the panel above the bed in Bill's room and the brief sights of people wandering around in sheets like ghosts and carrying candles. But, the ultimate reveal that whose who were seemingly killed by Billings' machine were actually put in suspended animation kind of hurts this macabre vibe, especially when a truly dead person was shown not too long beforehand.

Since it's Columbia, it shouldn't be that surprising to see some slapstick sprinkled throughout the movie, like Lorentz slipping on an apple in the basement, Bill's bed falling apart underneath him, a moment where he's dusting while standing atop a ladder, only to then sneeze and fall onto the chandelier in the tavern's main room, and the mishaps he gets into when he and Winnie are locked in Billings' hidden morgue. Finally, there are some very cartoonish and old-timey gags, like the sound of nervous, chattering

teeth heard a couple of times, the joke of Amelia sweeping dirt underneath rugs, and the sheer silliness of Maxie having a ticklish head. Speaking of which, you can't help but smirk at how one random thing on top of another ruins Billings' experiments: his subjects have items that interfere with the rays, Maxie can't bear for the necessary helmet to be placed on his head, his clogged sinuses prevent him from inhaling anesthetic, and a prime opportunity to use an unconscious Bill in the experiment is ruined when Jo-Jo breaks in. And to top it all off, Billings learns he's actually created a means of putting humans in suspended animation, which disappoints him, as he moans, "But I did so want to make a superman."

That leads me to the notion that this was meant as something of a patriotic horror-comedy, a description that, now that I'm reading it back, I don't think I've ever heard before. Not only is the ongoing war in Europe addressed several times, with Bill mentioning in his first appearance that he's been drafted, but the reason why Billings is trying to create a superman in the first place is to help win the war. He tells Lorentz, "But for one, minute little error, that man, at this very moment, by sheer, dynamic force, would be flying around

this room like an inspired plane under his own power... Tanks, cannons, flamethrowers, ha! He would destroy Berlin! He would throttle Tokyo! Think of it: but for a monkey-wrench in his pocket, that man would be winning the war for America right now." There's also the revelation that Brampton is the head of the Historical Society of America and has declared the tavern a historic landmark, at one point mentioning that Benedict Arnold once sneaked through the place's

hidden passageways, as well as the idea of the war coming to the tavern in the form of Jo-Jo, who flat-out calls himself a "fascist," has escaped from a Canadian prison camp, and plans to commit a terrorist attack on a munitions plant. As he holds Billings and Lorentz hostage, they attempt to realize their ultimate plan on a small scale by putting Maxie through the process of turning him into a superman and have him deal with Jo-Jo, which ends up not working out (when Jo-Jo asks what they're doing to Maxie, Lorentz says it's to "invigorate his powder puff personality" and Jo-Jo sneers, "Nyah, only an Americano would want their 'personality,'"; real subtle, isn't it?).

Despite being made on low budgets, a lot of Columbia's films from this period tended to have a pretty expensive look due to how they saved props and sets from one film to another, but because of the rundown setting of Billings Tavern, where 98% of it takes place, this film has more of a middle-of-the-road look and feel. The exterior of the tavern looks presentable, as it sits in a small, humble farmyard with a barn on the property, but the inside is basically falling apart. The main sitting room is horribly dusty, with Amelia having swept

copious amounts of dirt underneath the carpeting, and a staircase to the second floor is brittle and worm-eaten, with the first step always breaking and falling through when someone, usually Bill, attempts to go up. The upstairs, where the lodgers' rooms are, is equally rundown, dirty, and littered, and the rooms themselves have such issues as beds that fall apart, window blinds that come off, mirrors and pictures that are badly tilted, etc. The most memorable room is Prof. Billings'

laboratory in the basement, filled with all the usual mad scientist trappings like test tubes and bottles, arcing and glowing electrical equipment, all manners of switches and control panels, and the main machine, a see-through box wherein his test subjects sit while they're inundated with the rays meant to turn them into supermen. According to a collection of essays called Hollywood Chemistry: When Science Met Entertainment, there was also supposed to be a transparent, plastic figure of a

woman here but the Production Code nixed the idea due to their "no nudity, in fact or silhouette" stance. Far in the lab's corner is a small alcove full of wine racks, one of which conceals the entrance to Billings' makeshift morgue, which he's made out of a featureless, flat room he says was once used to store wines and the "choice cheeses." To the right of the morgue's entrance is a hidden door that opens into a dark, enclosed stairway, which itself leads up to a panel behind a painting above the bed in Bill's room.

Another tie between this film and Columbia's Three Stooges shorts is that the cinematographer was Henry Freulich, who shot a number of them, and while there's nothing mind-blowing about the photography here, he brings that same stark, black-and-white look that you often got in those shorts. That said, sometimes the cinematography has a murky quality to it, especially the darkly lit, nighttime, scenes, such as the one that takes place out in the barnyard and was clearly done day-for-night, but it

kind of fits with the crappy nature of the setting. The best examples of Freulich's work, though, are in the scenes set down in the laboratory when the equipment is glowing and sparking in the dark, the gloomy-looking morgue that's lit almost exclusively by candlelight, and the very sharp contrasts of black and white in the secret passage that leads up to Bill's bedroom.

At the end of the day, while I myself don't mind this movie (but also don't absolutely love it), I have a feeling that many modern day viewers would not get much out of it and for two reasons. One, while Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre are awesome as always and, even if their antics are never gut-busting, play off each other greatly, everything else, from Winnie and Bill's constant arguing, the crazy weirdness of the other characters like Amelia, and the downright silly notion of Maxie's head being ticklish, might come off as stupid and

even annoying. I myself find the slapstick and creepy shenanigans Bill gets caught up in to be fairly amusing, and I think the character of Maxie, albeit dumb, is funny, but other stuff like Amelia's chicken obsession, Ebenezer's pig preoccupation, and the scenario of the police officers running into trouble while getting to the tavern and ultimately deciding to commit everyone there, isn't that great and could come off as pointless and moronic. And as I mentioned, I don't like the idea that Prof. Billings' machine didn't actually kill his test subjects, as it feels like they took the cheap way out of the macabre comedy they were going for.

The other reason, which is a problem I do have, is how scatter-brained this story is, building subplot onto subplot until it's a scrambled mess. It starts out simple enough, with the main plot of Billings having trouble with his experiments and the subplot of Winnie Layden buying the tavern, only for her ex-husband to show up and attempt to prove everyone there is attempting to scam her, all while dealing with everyone's craziness and what a squalid place it is. Then, Dr. Lorentz learns what

Billings is trying to do and offers to help in order to profit off it. So far, so good, and for a little bit, it seems as though they're going to spend much of the remaining runtime attempting to use Bill in the experiment. Even their decision to go with Maxie when getting Bill proves to be too difficult is alright, as it still ties into that main plot-line. But then, things start getting complicated, with Brampton's suspicious sneaking about the property and Billings and Lorentz's investigating him

leading them to discover that one of the lodgers has been murdered. They call the police but, again, those two officers run into their own problems, and on top of that, Bill, believing their claim about a dead body is one of their tricks, as it disappeared offscreen, tells the munitions guard who holds the officers up that there's been no murder, leading to more trouble for them when he takes them to be interrogated. Following that, it becomes a total clusterfuck, as Winnie and Bill get locked in the

hidden morgue, Billings and Lorentz are held hostage by a prison camp escapee who randomly breaks into the tavern's basement, Amelia and Ebenezer are revealed to have would-be or, in the latter's case, actual murderers and are arrested by the cops when they finally make it there, and Brampton's true identity is finally revealed. By the end of the movie, everyone and their mother has gathered down in the laboratory, Maxie is apparently the latest casualty of Billings'

experiments, Jo-Jo tries to blow everyone up but his bomb turns out to be a dud, and Maxie and the other test subjects are revealed to have actually been put into suspended animation. It ends with the officers deciding to have them all committed, though Lorentz's admission of being the chairman of the asylum's board of directors ensures that there's hope for some of them.

Other than a warm, homey bit that you hear when it first opens and traditional, orchestral music that plays over the radio Amelia is listening to afterward, the movie has no music score apart from the main title theme, with only a musical director, M.W. Stoloff, credited. However, said main theme (which, according to IMDB, was composed by John Leipold) is a very memorable one, starting off like typical, melodramatic horror film music from the period, only to segue into a silly, comedic main piano piece that has a sneaking, clomping, naughty sound to it, accompanied by a handful of slide-whistles and a calmer but no less goofy-sounding middle part that then transitions back into a reprise of the main theme. This piano piece is played again over the ending title card, only much faster and zanier-sounding.

The Boogie Man Will Get You is a very odd duck of a movie and, as such, is also quite a mixed bag. What it has going for it is the teaming of Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre, who make every moment of their screentime worthwhile, amusing instances of quirky, macabre, and, in some cases, slapstick humor on their part, funny instances of level-headed characters having to deal with the weirdness that surrounds them, fair production values and black and white cinematography, and a memorably kooky and mischievous-sounding main title theme. However, some may find the comedy surrounding the supporting characters to be just plain dumb rather than funny, and even for this type of movie, the story becomes so convoluted and top-heavy by the end that one wishes they'd stayed the course they were on earlier. If you're a fan of Karloff and Lorre, the movie is worth watching for them alone, and it's barely over an hour in length, so it's not going to eat up much of your day or evening either way, but there were much better horror-comedies made during this era.