Believe It or Not #4 is a very strange 9 minutes from 1931

If you have ten minutes to kill and you like looking at things that feel like they shouldn't exist, this is for you.

If you want a movie with a plot or characters you actually care about, go watch The Barker instead.

Believe It or Not #4 is basically a museum of the strange squeezed into a tiny black-and-white short.

It was made in 1931, which is a weird time for movies anyway.

Everything feels a bit stiff, like everyone is holding their breath waiting for the camera to stop.

Robert Ripley is the guy in charge, and he is not exactly a natural actor.

He stands there and tells us these 'facts' like he is reading a grocery list.

But the stuff he is saying is just bonkers.

The first big thing is this story about a Spanish lady.

Apparently, she nagged her husband so much he died, so she got his face tattooed on her tongue as penance.

He says it like it is a normal thing people do on a Tuesday.

The movie doesn't show the tongue, which is probably for the best because it sounds gross and I don't know how that would even look on 1931 film stock.

I spent about three minutes after that just wondering how you even tattoo a tongue back then.

Then we get a segment about a blind man in New Jersey.

He built his own house all by himself in Wayne.

It is actually pretty impressive and makes you feel a bit lazy for not fixing that leaky faucet in your kitchen.

The house looks solid, not like some shack that would blow over.

Then there is this professor who comes on to say a word that has 184 letters.

He wrote it on a blackboard and it takes up so much room.

It is a word from Aristophanes, and it is basically just a list of ingredients in a dish.

The professor looks so serious while saying it, like he is performing surgery.

It is almost funny how much effort he puts into it, and you can see him take a huge breath at the end.

Then the movie shifts to animation for a bit.

They show a 'rifle fish' that shoots water at bugs.

The animation is simple, but it has a charm that modern CGI just misses.

It reminds me of the stuff you'd see in Monkeying Around, just very early and experimental.

There is another animated bit about a home run in 1890.

A guy hit the ball, it bounced off the outfielder’s head, and went over the fence.

Imagine being that outfielder and having your mistake recorded in history forever.

The highlight for me was Ripley drawing.

He draws a Chinese man who had fingernails that were nearly 23 inches long.

Ripley is actually a really good artist, which I didn't expect.

Watching him sketch is the most 'real' he feels in the whole short.

The big finale is Carl Vaughan.

This guy has the biggest hands I have ever seen on a human being.

He picks up 12 pool balls at once.

One hand. No table help. Just raw grip strength.

It looks like he is holding a bunch of grapes, but they are solid billiard balls.

The way he just stands there holding them is incredible, and I tried to do it with three balls later and failed miserably.

Between these scenes, they show a family sitting around a 'television.'

It is 1931, so TVs were basically science fiction to most people back then.

The kid in the family looks like he is having a crisis of faith just watching the screen.

It feels like they are trying to sell us on the idea of the future while showing us the past.

It is a bit like The Holy City in that it tries to capture something bigger than itself.

The whole thing is just a collection of 'hey, look at this' moments.

It is not 'deep' and it won't change your life or anything.

But it is a great look at what people thought was entertaining 90 years ago.

Some of it is just weirdly mean, like the 'nagging' joke about the dead husband.

Some of it is genuinely cool, like the pool balls.

The sound is a bit crackly, but you can hear everything fine if you turn it