Review for One Body Too Many

(Originally posted on fight-evil.com)

Though with an additional comedic element, One Body Too Many has almost all the staples of 1930's and 1940's horror movies. A dark and stormy night, a crowded mansion, mistaken identity, reading of a will, secret passages, red herrings, the whole shebang. In fact, the only thing it doesn't have is a gorilla. Still, I don't say this as to portray the movie as being too generic - while that might be the case, I happen to love these dark and stormy night will-reading movies; they're entertaining, and this one's no different.

The aesthetics are pretty cool - thunder and lightning in the backdrop as multiple mysterious people are creeping through a silent dark house. While the copy I own (and that's most widely available) is a bit on the grainy side, it doesn't lose the effect. The downside of the film is two-fold, though: firstly, the while the plot is simple, throwing in ten to twelve different characters can come across as convoluted. When the killer was revealed at the end, I thought he had already been seen with the other characters in the previous scene. Lost a bit of the power they might have been aiming for.

Really, the main character (played by Jack Haley), Bela Lugosi's character, and Professor Hilton (William Edmunds) were the only ones that I could easily tell apart. Most of the others were interchangeable. Still, that may be more a problem with myself than the movie. Secondly, though, is the run time. While the movie is just 75 minutes (an hour and 15 minutes), some sequences seemed to drag on a bit too long (especially one particular sequence involving secret passageways about an hour into the film). Had they just cut out ten to 15 minutes, I think the movie would have been a bit better.

The comedic elements overall weren't too bad or distracting (the main character's cowardice, not to mention a few of the antics, were a bit much), and some of it was actually rather amusing, such as the recurring gag of the butler (Lugosi) trying to serve seemingly-poisoned coffee multiple times throughout the movie, only to get consistently rejected. I have to admit, I got a kick out of that. When I first saw this film, I rated it slightly above average. It just doesn't stand up to my memories, though. One Body Too Many is an amusing film, but the problems can be a bit glaring. Overall, I think it's slightly below average. 6.5/10.