5/10
Venus If You Please
4 May 2011
Warning: Spoilers
Bud and Lou finally decide to invade outer space and interplanetary relations will never be the same after Abbott and Costello Go To Mars. And they couldn't even get that right because it's Venus they wind up on.

Bud does maintenance and deliveries at a scientific base and Lou is the oldest orphan in the world who sneaks on an army base and has to be kept there for security reason by order of Dr. Robert Paige and his assistant Martha Hyer.

Which says security on this base is lousy because Bud and Lou accidentally lift the rocket off while cleaning it and become the world's first astronauts. They arrive at New Orleans during Mardi Gras and think they're on Mars because of all the colorfully costumed people. That being done they go right back to the rocket ship and take off again this time with two escaped convicts, Horace McMahon and Jack Kruschen, who have just robbed a bank.

Then they arrive on Venus where the planet is populated by Amazons, men having been expelled hundreds of years ago. It's quite a place, but has its rules.

This jaunt to outer space by A&C is once again quite below the standards of their work in the Forties. With Universal having a new look being typified by new leading men, Tony Curtis, Rock Hudson, and Jeff Chandler, Bud and Lou were no longer keeping the studio on the plus side of the ledger. They were gradually being phased out and this picture and others kind of prove it.

The film provided some work for Joe Kirk who occasionally appeared as Mr. Baccagalupe on the A&C television series. Today the Italian American Anti-Defamation League would get all kinds of upset with his caricatured Italian scientist with the exaggerated accent. Nothing different from Kirk's character on television however, but you'd never get away with it today. It's a carryover from the ethnic humor of the Abbott and Costello days in burlesque where that kind of stuff was standard.

This is not a bad A&C feature, but hardly anything like Buck Privates.
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