Thundering Taxis (1933)
* 1/2 (out of 4)
This here is without question the worst entry in Hal Roach's Taxi Boys series. This one here is yet another head scratcher but more on that in a bit. The story has our "Taxi Boys" getting a fight started with a rival taxi company and soon the two sides are doing battle with the other guys often winning. Billy Bevan and Clyde Cook eventually gets things really heated and this leads to a battle in the streets. Leonard Maltin had a great book on shorts from this era but even it wasn't that complete when it came to this series. There doesn't seem to be too much out there in terms of reading about the Taxi Boys series, which is a shame because as other reviews have said the series is rather confusing. I'm not sure what the point of switching the film stars so much was but this one here is full of stock footage from a silent movie. Whenever I watch a movie I hate to be thinking about anything other than the story in front of me but this movie here had me thinking which movie I was actually watching. You could tell the silent stuff because of the speed but at other times I wondered if I was watching freshly shot material or if perhaps they were using footage from a third picture. The film looks horrible and you can't help but feel it was thrown together because the studio had to get a new film in the theater and didn't have a real one ready to go. I didn't laugh at anything and the big special effects of an ending doesn't work simply because it's another movie.
