If the major studios could make all-star films, why not Monogram Studios? Here producer Sam Katzman teamed the two big attractions at the poverty row – the East Side Kids (formerly the Dead End Kids) and Bela Lugosi.The kids are on their way to summer camp when they wind up in a haunted house – cue appearance by Bela Lugosi, playing it straight to a team of comedians years before Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein.
This is the first East Side Kids movie I’d ever seen (I’d seen Dead End and Angels with Dirty Faces) – they’re high spirited, fast paced fun, like a well done Saturday morning cartoon show along the lines of Scooby Doo, complete with lots of running around a creepy house getting scared. There’s no girls, and the black East End Kid is a lawdy lawdy black comic type – but fix up those two things maybe you could remake them today. The kids think Bela is nasty but he turns out to be a harmless magician – Lugosi would be a red herring so often that a two part article was written on the topic. He is supported in this film by a midget, a combination which would later appear in The Corpse Vanishes and Scared to Death.
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