YMMV / The Unholy Three

• Adaptation Displacement: Not many people know of these movies, but even less know of the novel of the same name that they were based on.
• Complete Monster (1925 version): Tweedledee, the worst member of the titular three, is a circus dwarf who with his cohorts turns to robbery for profit. Lacking the redeeming qualities of the charming Professor Echo and the brutish muscleman Hercules, Tweedledee manipulates the latter into joining him on a score without the former. This results in Tweedledee sadistically murdering an old man begging for his life, strangling his three-year-old daughter nearly to death, and setting up an innocent man to take the fall and be executed for the crime. Totally remorseless and in fact gleefully boasting about this despicable crime, Tweedledee eventually decries both his compatriots' liabilities and attempts to murder them both too, along with Echo's girlfriend Rosie.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The sound version ends with Chaney smiling and waving goodbye to the viewer, promising to send a post card. By itself, it seems like your standard Bittersweet Ending, but when you realize that this wound up being the very last shot in his very last film, it becomes something of a meta Tearjerker.
  • Another ironic thing: Hector gives Echo a box of cigarettes. Throat cancer from smoking is what killed Chaney in real life.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • In the novel, we have Echo choking his dummy in the opening chapters; while doing so, he gives the dummy's voice a sickening, horrific choking sound that the book describes in unsettling detail.
  • Also from the novel, Hercules and Tweedledee screaming as they're being electrocuted.
  • The gorilla coming into the locked room, baring its teeth at the camera, and rushing at Hercules in the 1925 film.
  • Victor McLaglen (Hercules in the 1925 version) gives some of the most unhinged-looking facial expressions throughout the film.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Tod Browning, the director of the 1925 version, would go on to direct Dracula (1931) and Freaks.
  • Mae Busch (Rosie in the silent version) would go on to be a frequent supporting player in the Laurel and Hardy shorts, and actually played Mrs. Hardy in their very first sound film, Unaccustomed As We Are.
  • Harry Earles (Tweedledee in both versions) would go on to play Hans in Freaks and (what would become his most well-known and recognizable role) one of the Lollipop Guild singers in The Wizard of Oz (he's the one in the blue shirt).
• Tearjerker: Tweedledee's back story in the book. He really tried to rise above the mockery and be a good person, and the author does a very effective job of showing something dying inside him once he finally reaches his breaking point. Granted, in spite of this, it's very hard to feel anything other than contempt for him by the end of the book.