DVD Review: Spooks Run Wild

As a comedy franchise, the Bowery Boys (a.k.a. the Dead End Kids a.k.a. the East Side Kids) haven't received much respect over the years. From the group's debut in the 1937 Academy Award-nominated social drama Dead End to their years working for poverty row producer "Jungle" Sam Katzman is, admittedly, one heck of a career descent. Back in the sixties, though, I remember spending much of my pre-teens watching East Side Kids/Bowery Boys features on Chicago afternoon television: like many '40s movie series to come out of Monogram Pictures (e.g., the Charlie Chans), they were an inexpensive way for local stations to fill in slow time. Caught a lotta these cheapies – and if they weren't exactly classic comedies, they were certainly more watchable than much of what passed for sitcoms back in those days, if only because they had the air of coming from a different time and place.

Nowadays, the best place to view one of these low-rent features is in the cheapie DVD bins: fortunately, with Halloween around the corner, the number of bargain discs featuring public domain fright flicks is on the rise. I recently picked up a three-movie set called Ghostly Grins that included one of two movies the lads made with a down-on-his-luck Bela Lugosi. (As an added bonus: Angela Rossito, the dwarf from both Freaks and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome!) Short and slapdash, the 71-minute Spooks Run Wild (1941) is an Old Dark House "comedy" that plays like it has maybe a half-hour of script – and forty minutes of ad libs.

Though opening with stock footage of '40s NYC, the flick takes place in rural upstate New York, where the aging East Siders have purportedly been bussed to spend the summer. We're not particularly sure what our gang of uncouth city hooligans has done to get sent on this early Brat Camp experience -- the movie doesn't really bother to tell us -- but the camp is run by B-Western movie actor Dave "Tex" O'Brien, unconvincingly playing a law student this time, and his nurse girlfriend Linda (Dorothy Short). The main quartet of Kids in this outing are bossy Muggsy (Leo Gorcey), dopey Glimpy (Huntz Hall), boring Danny (Bobby Jordan), and lone black Kid Scruno ("Sunshine Sammy" Morrison), who gets to do all the expected patented big-eyed fright moves, though not as broadly as, oh, Mantan Moreland might've done 'em.

Article Author: Bill Sherman

Bill Sherman is a Books editor for Blogcritics. With his lovely wife Rebecca Fox, he has recently co-authored a sudsy comic fat acceptance novel entitled Measure By Measure.

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