Review Detail
9.9 4 10
(Updated: June 02, 2022)
Overall rating
10.0
Audio/Video Quality
10.0
Audio Editing
10.0
Visual Editing
10.0
Narrative
10.0
Enjoyment
10.0
Be warned: this edit is filled wall-to-wall with bad audio cuts. Why, then, am I giving it a ten in the audio editing department? Because all those terrible cuts are in the original film, and sadly there's no way around them. For first time viewers, this might paint the wrong picture about Paranoid Android's remarkable editing skills, so a clarification is due just in case.
Other than that, this is a much stronger version of one of Laurel and Hardy's weakest films. All the funny stuff remains (the classroom scene has me in stitches every time) and the filler and terrible decisions are gone. Just by removing the whole plantation segment the movie would inmediately improve quite a lot (it makes one think: it is so easy to seamlessly remove that it was likely designed that way, but for opposite reasons to the ones we have today - for us it is cringeworthy racism, but back in 1931, with the Jim Crow laws sadly still enforced, certain Southern states would remove anything depicting black people. Sigh!) but this goes further than that and also deletes jokes that fell flat and scenes that killed the pacing. While the rescue of the warden's daughter is not a bad scene by itself, the climax is just so much better paced without it (the rescue was never supposed to be there anyway, for some reason they took it from an alternate language version, slapped it here, and called it a restored cut. Oh well).
If only the film was released this way back then, no doubt it would be considerably better regarded today. Kudos to Paranoid Android for making this, and for giving us another fanedit of a classic movie. Precious few of these are made overall, sadly.
Other than that, this is a much stronger version of one of Laurel and Hardy's weakest films. All the funny stuff remains (the classroom scene has me in stitches every time) and the filler and terrible decisions are gone. Just by removing the whole plantation segment the movie would inmediately improve quite a lot (it makes one think: it is so easy to seamlessly remove that it was likely designed that way, but for opposite reasons to the ones we have today - for us it is cringeworthy racism, but back in 1931, with the Jim Crow laws sadly still enforced, certain Southern states would remove anything depicting black people. Sigh!) but this goes further than that and also deletes jokes that fell flat and scenes that killed the pacing. While the rescue of the warden's daughter is not a bad scene by itself, the climax is just so much better paced without it (the rescue was never supposed to be there anyway, for some reason they took it from an alternate language version, slapped it here, and called it a restored cut. Oh well).
If only the film was released this way back then, no doubt it would be considerably better regarded today. Kudos to Paranoid Android for making this, and for giving us another fanedit of a classic movie. Precious few of these are made overall, sadly.
D