Console best movie i've ever seen.

Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Bumpy Chip It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Raymond Sierra The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

JohnHowardReid Until DVDs arrived on the scene, this was one of the rarest of all Abbott & Costello movies - and with good reason: It's not very funny. True, the team are in good voice and have a couple of able assistants in Joe Besser (as a pamby manservant) and Shemp Howard (a near-sighted gunman). In fact, Besser and Howard are given more amusing material than the stars. Lacking their usual writer, John Grant, Abbott and Costello have been fashioned into rather unusual characters. At first glance, Abbott is his normal hectoring, looking-out-solidly-for-number-one self, but then we find him volunteering to don a lion-skin so that his fraidy-cat buddy can impress the blonde vamp - something the old Abbott would never do. Costello's character has undergone an even more startling metamorphosis: No longer a lovable dimwit, he is a lying, cowardly braggart of uncommon stupidity yet self-preserving disloyalty! It's obvious that writer Earl Baldwin gave no great thought to sympathy or consistency of characterization but simply threw every old wheeze and routine he could think of into an already overburdened script. Unfortunately a lot of this material wasn't even meant to be funny in the first place. With the exception of such extended ennui-inducing episodes as Lou taming a lion in the process screen, the straight material is even more tedious than the unfunny funny. By and large, Baldwin lost a contract-sent opportunity to send up the whole jungle genre. Contenting himself with a few mild japes (Lou propelling his canoe with an eggbeater; the Baer Brothers trading insults), he allows Hillary Brooke (attractive though she is) to strut around in dead seriousness like the queen of a Congo serial. This mood is abetted by Frank Buck and particularly Clyde Beatty who take themselves very earnestly indeed. So eager were the producers to get their money's worth out of Beatty, they even provide him a chair, a whip and a cage of lions. A daring act certainly, but as presented in Africa Screams, boringly long-winded.

Leofwine_draca Africa Screams is another silly comedy for Bud Abbott and Lou Costello; the title tells you everything you need to know about this one. Costello has the location of some valuable diamonds memorised, or so the bad guys think, so he and Abbott are roped along into a jungle expedition. They soon meet up with all of the clichés of the jungle adventure genre, from crocodile attacks to a man-in-a-suit gorilla, crazy natives, and some ferocious lions. I found the comedy to be dragged out far too much in this film, and Costello is an interminable presence at times; Abbott is just unpleasant for much of this. As a result the film is a bit of a chore to watch, even if it does contain the likes of Shemp Howard and other former celebrities.

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!"

dougdoepke Wow! The usually frumpy Costello looks positively dapper in his snazzy salesman's suit at movie's start. Superior A&C comedy with good routines, productive premise, and unusual cast. The boys get to chase around the wilds of a Hollywood sound stage pretending (not very hard) to be adventuring in darkest Africa. Of course, Lou gets to do his slow-to-catch- on routine as crocodiles, gorillas, and other assorted man-eating critters nuzzle up in humorously menacing fashion. I love it, though, when that savage-looking kitten scares the be-Jesus out of him in a downtown department store, no less.And whose great idea was it to load up the cast with some real characters. Take the giant Baer brothers, Max and Buddy, for example. Together they look like they could tear down the Empire State building without a wreaking ball. Not exactly, your usual movie types, and when they start scuffling, you can almost feel the ground shake. Then too, what an inspiration to stick coke-bottle glasses on Shemp Howard of Three Stooges fame and turn him into a nearly blind big-game hunter! So, better hide the house pets. But I really am curious how little, fat comedian Joe Besser snuck on set when the movie already had a little, fat comedian who's a lot funnier. Add real life adventurers Clyde Beatty and Frank Buck, along with the always regal Hillary Brooke who glitters, as usual, but never gets in on the fun, and it all adds up to a lively and entertaining bunch of characters. Perhaps best of all, A&C are still looking fresh in their roles, and if some of the routines wheeze a bit, the boys are still able to give them the needed lift, something they did not do in the last few years before the final 1956 break-up. Sure, this kind of nonsense is not everyone's cup of tea. But I defy even the sourest sour-puss not to surrender a few chuckles as the boys bumble along Africa-style.