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6.7/10
Senior Film Conservator
A definitive 6.7/10 rating for a film that redefined the boundaries of cult cinema. Woman Haters remains a cornerstone of transgressive art.
If you want to see where the Stooges started, Woman Haters is absolutely worth twenty minutes of your afternoon. 🍿
Anyone obsessed with old slapstick or comedy history will find it fascinating, but if you can't stand cheesy musical rhymes, you'll probably want to turn it off immediately.
It's a weird little relic from 1934.
The biggest shockor is that the whole thing is done in rhyming verse. Yes, really.
Every single line of dialogue sounds like a nursery rhyme, which gets a bit exhausting after about five minutes.
Larry is actually the main character here, which feels completely wrong if you're used to Moe running the show.
He goes and gets married to Marjorie White, even though he just joined a club vowing to hate women.
Then they all end up on a train, and Larry has to hide his new wife from Moe and Curly.
There is a bit where they are all trying to sleep in the same tiny train bunk, and it's just pure chaos.
Curly keeps getting his head stepped on, and Moe looks genuinely annoyed.
You can see they haven't quite figured out their signature violence yet.
The eye pokes aren't as sharp, and the sound effects are a bit quiet.
Also, a very young Walter Brennan shows up as a train conductor!
He doesn't have his teeth in, I think, and he already has that shaky voice he used for the next fifty years.
It reminds me a bit of those old silent shorts like Isn't Life Terrible? where the comedy comes from just how uncomfortable the situation gets.
Marjorie White is honestly the best part of the whole short.
She has this manic, bouncy energy that makes Larry look like he's moving in slow motion.
It's tragic to think she died in a car crash not long after this was made.
She really had great comedic timing.
There is one shot where Curly is eating a piece of paper, and he just stares directly at the camera for a second too long.
It feels like he was waiting for the director to yell cut, but they just kept rolling.
The ending is super abrupt, too.
They all just get kicked off the train or something, and it just... ends.
But hey, it's the start of an era.
Its not their best work, but it is a super neat piece of history.
