Required reading:
CRIME ON THEIR HANDS threadWhat the heck? What the flipping heck? What the *censoring of an extremely long, offensive, and profanity-laden blue streak with a string of expletives thrown in for an added bonus*??!?!?
This is what is known as "hot garbage." This is one of the most bloody awful stock jobs yet, if not
the worst so far. There is nothing saving this short except the closing credits. I disagree that Shemp was a "dead man walking," as our beloved Big Chief said last week; but he certainly looks like one here! We have reused footage that sucked the first time around in THE HOT SCOTS, minus some funny lines when they were cleaning the yard in that short. We have reused footage from CRIME ON THEIR HANDS that was poorly spliced in.
Just for comparison's sake, I watched CRIME and then HOT ICE back to back. The characters don't even wear the same color clothes in both shorts. Add in obvious aging, hair styles changing, and overall bad splicing (with both the CRIME and HOT SCOTS footage), and we have a farce. A lot of these jumps result from Jules White's efforts to remove most all traces of Lester Allen, but he failed at doing that anyhow.
Barbara Bartay just sucks. She's not that good looking, she has a horrible accent, and she's a terrible actress. All the stuff Moe pulls out of her purse is amusing only for the amount and the lack of reaction Moe gives to what he finds. But she's just pathetic the entire way with it. Lester Allen and Cy Schindell came back from the dead for this one... and it killed them again, I do believe.
Kenneth MacDonald is seamless in his new scenes. The man was just incredibly talented, but I have ranted enough about how he is arguably the best actor to ever appear in a Stooge short even if he didn't provide the laughs that Vernon Dent and Bud Jamison did. We only have one more short with him in it, as I don't think he had any new scenes in SCHEMING SCHEMERS, did he? And BLUNDER BOYS being Kenneth's only non-villain role to boot!
The new scenes aren't even funny. They cut out bits here and there, like the second mint Shemp eats before the diamond. The scene in the room with the chest and the bum in the bed was humorless and added nothing to the plot. And the ending was just plain gruesome... they KILL Shemp at the end! They KILL him! They put a drill through his stomach and other awful things to close out the short.
I judge stock jobs based on how the shorts are merged and how good the new scenes are, therefore this short can...
BURN IN HELLTM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1/10