Define true pain.
Most people would call your bluff: the human mind, thankfully, can never truly reexperience true pain. Others would laugh at you: what is 'true' pain? And all of them would probably laugh at you if you mention The Three Stooges. But, as is the mission statement of Odd Cinema, sometimes you really fall upon something so damn hideous that you just have mention it, just to prove it's not some kind of odd fever dream.
The Three Stooges--of course, I mean Moe, Larry, and Curly (the way I spell it),--were best at what they did: vaudevillian slapstick. But today's experiment does not reflect that. There is nothing to really that makes this short (20 minutes long) stand out from the rest: it's three Elder Statesmen of Comedy at their best, before Curly left and the horror of Shemp came to light. Well, that, and the other two that nobody remembers came to light. Hideous, blinding light. But the true horror is twofold: first, this is the Stooges first (?) real attempt at organized satire. No flash-in-the-pan five second references here: all twenty minutes are spent going full tilt. For, you see, the Three Stooges are pretending that they're Nazis!
No, I kid you not. I only wish I was.
Moe is a thinly veiled Hitler-que dictator of Moronica while Curly and Larry are his Ministers/Heads of State (??). I wish I could recount the plot, but the only thing that stands in my mind is the fact that Moe stops every five seconds to shout out a tirade in German before trying to kill a Mata Hari-like spy, beating up others to get pieces of land, then just going about acting out of character just to make the point that the Nazis are bad. Considering this was made in 1943, I think that point had already been drilled into the ground. But it also begs the question: what in the hell were the boys thinking?
First, the Stooges are NOT good when they're playing someone besides themselves. They fall into that open sect of actors who can only play themselves. Nowadays, like Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. Watching them try to make a point without causing people to laugh out loud (unintentionally) is just goofy and awkward. In fact, it shows a certain shortcoming to the Stooges. I wonder what made them do this. I really do. It's one thing to play jerks as protagonists in your little short, but you have to make them sympathetic. The Stooges were able to do this well. But when they go into Nazi Territory.....ugh. It's awful. And it stinks.
But, the real stupidity (pun!) comes in at the last scene, where the boys are eaten by lions. Yes, lions. Killed, dead, eaten and buried and soon to be found in the nearest dung pile near you. Considering that all the violence in Stooge Shorts didn't really have a consequence (being shot merely hurts, a saw across the head has no real scar, and the old 'scissors-grabbing-the-nose' doesn't even affect sometimes), it's a sudden impact. It's surreal. More surreal than the swastika shown earlier in the piece.
So, in other words....it's disturbing. Funky and disturbing, like watching "Pleasantville."
RATING: Do you like Moe shouting in German? The Stooges trying to be subtle? A swastika and death at the end? The unsubtle 'subtle' humor? Even if you did, I can't recommend this. It's propragada of another kind, and it's kind of freaky. Zero Stars out of Four. The boys did better, but this is just too damn strange, even in the name of Patriotism.