Africa Screams

Africa Screams is a 1949 adventure comedy built around the comedy duo Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. Buzz Johnson and Stanley Livington work as clerks in a bookshop, where Buzz passes Stanley off as an expert on Africa to impress a woman named Diana Emerson. She wants a map for an expedition, but the two men end up taken along on the journey instead. In Africa they are pressed into leading Diana and her associates toward a tribe, while the real object of the hunt is a fortune in jewels. The film mixes the pair's usual comic bickering with jungle dangers and encounters with wildlife.

Charles Barton directed, with a screenplay by Earl Baldwin; Huntington Hartford and Edward Nassour produced. Abbott and Costello lead the cast as Buzz and Stanley, joined by Hillary Brooke as Diana Emerson and by animal trainers Clyde Beatty and Frank Buck, along with Buddy Baer. Barton had directed the duo the previous year in Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein, and would go on to make The Shaggy Dog a decade later. The film runs 79 minutes and took about 2 million dollars worldwide.

On IMDb it holds a rating of 6 out of 10 from roughly 4,300 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 5.7 out of 10 from about 70 votes. The larger IMDb sample suggests a modest but durable following for the comedy among viewers.