Spooky Spooks

A kaleidoscopic fun-house mirror of 1923 mores, Spooky Spooks detonates its own narrative like a string of Chinese firecrackers stuffed inside a trombone. Two vagabond barbers, paper-hat kings of a derelict boardwalk, stumble into a seaside mansion where Prohibition gin, spiritualist séances and a runaway heiress swirl in the same cut-crystal tumbler. Moonlit corridors elongate into carnivalesque tunnels; a burglar in a death-mask waltzes with a flapper whose pearls turn to cockroaches mid-dip. Every time the camera belches out a title card, the card itself is devoured by animated moths—an early, anarchic bite at the fourth wall. The plot, if one insists on calling it that, ricochets from slapstick tonsorial torture to Grand Guignol shadow play, climaxing when the heroes shear the villain’s moustache into a confession of embezzlement that unfurls like ticker-tape across the ballroom floor. Love is declared via ukulele serenade on a rooftop shaped like a question mark; death arrives wearing custard-pie armour. The film ends with the mansion folding into a paper boat and sailing toward a cardboard moon, leaving only the scent of bay rum and ether in the auditorium.