ONE BODY TOO MANY (1944) *1/2 Bela Lugosi is a lousy butler, he can't even serve a cup of coffee. They were aiming for comedic horror that wouldn't scare children, and it doesn't amuse them much either. The characters are established very nicely in the first few minutes, but none of the actors do much to build it much from there. Jack Haley is the source of the best of most of it, but in this one he appears to have neither heart, brain nor courage; instead just two vaguely competing images of himself that aren't particularly different. For all that, it's not a terrible weekend afternoon flick: the jokes aren't great but they're mostly ok and they keep coming; none of the actors are terrible; the plot's that same tired old comfortable thing about a bunch of people murdering each other in a house with secret passages; and there's just enough original painting around the edges (astrology, life insurance, caskets) that you know it isn't a film that you've already seen.
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