Noche de duendes

In the early 1930s, Hal Roach Studios realized that it's world famous duo, Laurel and Hardy, would be losing revenue now that talkies were widely available. With silent films, it was easy to change the inter-title cards in order to make versions of their films for export. However, with the talking pictures the studios hadn't yet perfected dubbing so it was decided to make some Italian, German, French and Spanish language Laurel and Hardy films by having the duo speak their lines in various languages phonetically.

This film is different, however, because it had about the worst pronunciation by the duo of any of their Spanish language films. While Ollie got better in later films, here he's pretty bad and Stanley is just awful. To make things worse, many of the original American cast also appeared and several of them were equally bad. In subsequent films, most of the cast (if not all) were native speakers. Here, it must be awfully frustrating for Spanish speakers to have to listen to what sounds like first year Spanish class! As for the film, it's a combination of two shorts (THE LAUREL AND HARDY MURDER CASE and BERTH MARKS). While BERTH MARKS is pretty much the same as the English language one, the MURDER CASE is simply terrible since it was much more language intensive and the language was so horribly maimed! Probably as a result, the energy level of this film is much lower than the original film and it just plods.

Overall, this is a pretty poor effort and is only of interest to huge fans of Laurel and Hardy like myself.