AaronCapenBanner
Abbott & Costello play Buzz Johnson & Stanley Livington, two booksellers who fool customer Diana Emerson(played by Hillary Brooke) that Stanley is a great explorer who knows all about Africa. This gets them abducted by Diana and her henchmen, who force them to lead the safari into Africa, where they use it as a front to find diamonds. Along the way, they encounter crocodiles, angry tribesmen, and a giant ape...(not King Kong however) Unfunny and poorly made film was another independent production that fell into the public domain. It is on DVD in its original black & white and also in color; either way, this is among their dumbest films.
gavin6942
Bud Abbott and Lou Costello search for diamonds in Africa, along the way meeting a visually-impaired gunner, a hungry lion, and a tribe of cannibals...I love the baby lion and the grown lion later on. Maybe they were not treated well by the studio (that seems to be common) but it made this all the better. Sure, the gorilla suit and snapping crocodiles are nice, but it is hard to beat a living animal -- lions! This is slightly less witty than their other work, the films with Universal. Some of the cracks are amusing, but it does not seem to be on the same level as "meet Frankenstein" or "meet the Killer". Is this because of the studio or the writing? I have no idea. Fans should still see it... besides, it has Shemp Howard!
ferbs54
When I was a youngster, many moons ago, no screen comedians tickled my funny bone more than Abbott and Costello. Be it on film or their "Abbott and Costello Show" on TV (repeats of this 1952-'54 program ran in NYC throughout the '60s for we baby boomers), the team could do no wrong for me. Forty years later, however, I find that A&C have lost much of their sparkle and charm, although the best of the films--such as "Buck Privates," "Keep 'Em Flying," "Pardon My Sarong" and of course "A&C Meet Frankenstein"--remain wonderful entertainments for me. The team does not seem to have aged as well as some others; I find the silent clowns (Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd) and the Marx Brothers, Laurel & Hardy, W.C. Fields, and the Stooges far funnier, somehow, today. A recent first viewing of the A&C film "Africa Screams," released in 1949, has only served to bolster my opinion here. This is a remarkably stoopid film, made on the supercheap, that is fairly consistently UNfunny, despite a terrific cast. In this one, Lou plays a salesman of safari books, and his character goes by the name of Stanley Livington (oy). His buddy, Buzz Johnson (Abbott), convinces pretty Diana Emerson (Hillary Brooke) that Stanley is a big-game hunter and safari guide (even though Stanley had previously confessed that as a child he was scared by his piggy bank, and that he was 15 before he ate his first animal cracker...double oy!), and so off go the three (along with Diana's thuggish accomplices, played by real-life boxing brothers Max and Buddy Baer) to hunt for the Orangutan gargantua in the African jungle. But wait...what the boys don't know is that Diana is actually an unscrupulous diamond hunter! (This last is not really a spoiler; this movie was BORN spoiled!)Anyway, baby boomers who grew up loving the sweet and lovely Hillary Brooke on "The A&C Show" may be surprised to see her portray a "bad girl" here, but actually, Hillary had been known for playing bad girls for many years (check her out in 1944's "Ministry of Fear" or 1946's "Strange Impersonation" for proof). She manages to escape from this wholly unfunny wreck with her dignity fairly intact. Real-life lion tamer Clyde Beatty is in the film (his scenes with the big cats ARE pretty darn impressive), as is real-life big-game hunter Frank "Bring 'Em Back Alive" Buck, and they too emerge likable and unscathed. Not so for then-current Stooge Shemp Howard, playing a Mr. Magoo type, or for future Stooge Joe Besser (playing Diana's butler and doing, essentially, a warm-up performance for his Stinky Davis character on "The A&C Show" a few years later). "Africa Screams," incidentally, marked the first time that A&C, Brooke and Besser worked as a team, and is the only time that Shemp and Besser appeared together.As may be expected, the film dishes out all kinds of shenanigans with lions, crocodiles, zany monkeys, "Umgawa"-spouting cannibals, and the seemingly inevitable man in a gorilla suit; you can doubtless imagine. Instances of extreme stoopidity include that ridiculous native chant, Stanley's use of an egg beater as a ship propeller, and the film's protracted ending, during which A&C, Diana and her thugs, cannibals, monkeys and that darn gorilla chase each other through the jungle. Homages to then-recent films "Mighty Joe Young" and "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" fail to engender any laffs, either. Actually, I only chuckled three or four times during the course of this 79-minute film, but they were more chuckles of disbelief at the inanity on screen than chuckles of actual mirth. AND, strange to say, Bud struck me as more amusing than Lou in this outing. Go figure. Truly, "Africa Screams" is a movie for hard-core A&C historians only, and possibly kids up to age 6 (and even THEY might be rolling their eyes). The lousy print quality of this Westlake Video DVD doesn't help matters, either. Y'know, it just struck me that this film makes the 1963 Bob Hope vehicle "Call Me Bwana" look like high art! To quote Buzz, as he watches Stanley jump into a crocodile-infested river: "What a belly flop!"
