Movie review - "Ghosts on the Loose" (1943) **

Bela Lugosi and the East Side Kids were well liked enough as a team in Spooks Run Wild for Sam Katzman and Jack Dietz at Monogram to reunite them in another comedy-horror. Well, comedy-thriller is probably more accurate, as this one has the Kids bust a Nazi spy ring.

The plot revolves around the wedding of one of the kids' sister - she's played by Ava Gardner! And she was stunningly beautiful even then. Unfortunately both Bela and Ava are hardly in it; most of the action consists of the East Side Kids poking around an old house, wondering if it's haunted, and the Nazis trying to scare them away.

There's not really enough story here for a feature - it's about 20 minutes worth. We do get the East Side Kids singing in a choir (for the wedding), some funny stuff as they help prepare the wedding - this whole film probably should have revolved around the wedding. Its a bit piss weak that all the Nazis are up to his printing propaganda leaflets - they should be making bombs and/or kidnapping or something.

Very light but amiable. Tom Weaver got stuck into this film in his book Poverty Row Horrors but I didn't mind it. Too light to be offensive.

Movie review - "Spooks Run Wild" (1941) ** (re-viewing)

Boys of the City seems to have been well received enough for Monogram and Sam Katzman to rehash it - once again the kids are off to summer camp, once again they are waylaid by scary people, with a red herring and a genuine maniac. I actually enjoyed this more than the first film - the plot was simpler and there was Bela Lugosi and his midget sidekick providing fun as seeming villains who turn about to be magicians.

The film actually would've been better if Lugosi had been the villain as he has real threat. It's silly and dumb but I have affection for this film.

Movie review - "Boys of the City" (1940) *

A movie about the East Side Kids, a gang of wise cracking juvenile delinquents who got up to trouble. They head off to camp and get waylaid, winding up in a haunted house.

It's like Dead End Kids meets The Cat and the Canary - an old dark house story with our heroes bumbling around and meeting a scary house keeper, mysterious chef - there's a scared black kid who is terrified a la Willie Best in The Ghost Breakers, a scene where the house keeper torments a young girl a la Rebecca, a Charlie Chan style denouement.

It was directed by Joseph Lewis who always tries to do something visually interesting. For a while I enjoyed this - a quite complex plot is set up with the kids staying at a house owned by a judge whom people are trying to kill, the judge was a bit corrupt, the kids were mentored by a former gangster who the judge sent to jail, there's a girl in there.

But the script becomes muddled. There were so many characters it was hard to tell who was who. The middle section drops the plot and consists of the boys poking around the house in some unscary scenes. It's not very scary. It was hard going as it went on and I was glad the film ended.

Movie review – “Spooks Run Wild” (1941) **

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.