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Best movie ever!

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Would anyone have believed that an Academy Award would be in the future for one of the participants in Spooks Run Wild back in 1941? I think one would have been told to get a cranial examination. Yet Carl Foreman who wrote the screenplay would be getting one eleven years later for High Noon. Unfortunately blacklist was also in his future.Academy Award winners didn't usually work at Monogram Pictures, but one starts to learn the trade somewhere in the film business. In this case it's with The Bowery Boys. They've been sent in the charge of Dave O'Brien and Dorothy Short to a summer camp. The boys go wandering off and come upon a haunted house occupied by Bela Lugosi.The usual Bowery Boy monkeyshines are present throughout. When the boys go wandering off however, we're informed that a serial killer is also loose in the area. It's from Monogram so don't expect all that much. Still it's interesting to see the genesis of High Noon?

Spooks Run Wild (1941) * 1/2 (out of 4)The East Side Kids get into trouble once again so a councilor decides to take them on a trip for two weeks to get away from the city. They end up in a small town and decide to walk away from shelter and end up in a creepy haunted castle with a strange man (Bela Lugosi) inside.SPOOKS RUN WILD isn't a very good movie as it does very little "right" but at the same time I must admit that I watch it quite often because there's just something rather charming about it. Seeing The East Side Kids mix it up with Bela Lugosi should have made for a much better movie but it's obvious this was made on the cheap and very quickly. I'm sure most of the scenes here could have done better but they weren't really going for quality but instead something to get onto movie screens quick.I think the greatest thing the film offers is Lugosi in a very colorful performance. I'm sure he was probably wondering why he had to appear in something like this but the actor still gave it his all and delivered a rather fun performance. Just check out the highlight of the picture when Lugosi goes to complete terror when a skeleton is coming after him. So much energy and passion can be seen here, which is something only Lugosi could deliver. The rest of the cast are good in their roles but there's no question that the screenplay didn't give them much to work with.Again, SPOOKS RUN WILD is a pretty poor movie. The dialogue is rather weak and there's no question that there's not too much to the actual story. Still, if you're a fan of Lugosi then it's pretty much worth watching just for his performance alone.

For a while I thought "Spooks Run Wild" and "Ghosts on the Loose" were the same film, both featuring The East Side Kids teaming up with Bela Lugosi. This, the earlier of the two movies is heavier on the haunted house atmospherics which the East Siders use to fire off their gags and one liners. Lugosi comes complete with his Count Dracula outfit and midget sidekick Angelo Rossitto; the long view of his mountaintop retreat is reminiscent of the sinister house in "Psycho".What's kind of neat about the story as it progresses is that the boys all take turns teaming up with each other as they search for their injured buddy Peewee (David Gorcey) in the huge Billings Estate. Peewee seems to be in a trance after being treated by Nardo (Lugosi), so his pals connect Nardo to the 'monster killer' they heard about on the radio on the way to camp. In between the sound and sight gags, Scruno (Sunshine Sammy Morrison) has some fun with the stereotyped scaredy cat role he's given as the black member of the East Siders - "I'm so scared I'm turnin' white now"; and later - "A white spider, that must have been the ghost of the black widow!" It all comes across as pretty harmless, but done today, the political correctness police would be all over it.There's a line Lugosi speaks in the film that reminded me of his performance in 1931's "Dracula". In that earlier film, a wolf howls in the distance and Dracula says to Renfield - "Listen to them... children of the night, what music they make." Under similar circumstances in "Spooks", while walking through the Hillside Cemetery, he remarks - "City of the dead. Do they too hear the howling of the fighting dogs?" I wonder if that line was intended as a tribute to the horror classic.From the outset, I had the idea that the old switcheroo would take Lugosi off the hook as the monster killer; indeed it turned out to be the spooky Dr. Von Grosch (Dennis Moore) who almost claimed Linda Mason (Dorothy Short) from the camp as his latest victim. Lugosi's convincing along the way though, even getting to use a version of that famous stare down from "Dracula" and "White Zombie".The diminutive Rossitto appeared with Lugosi a couple more times in pictures, in 1942's "The Corpse Vanishes", and 1947's "Scared to Death". He doesn't have a lot to do in any of the stories, in fact he doesn't even speak in this one, but his presence adds just a slight dash of bizarreness to the proceedings.At just over an hour in length, "Spooks Run Wild" is a fun diversion, but don't expect a tight script or much in the way of story development. It's all in the gags, one liners and Leo Gorcey's malapropisms. If you're putting together your list of films for Halloween fright night, this would be a good one to start off with.

The boys are rounded up and sent to summer camp in the Catskill mountains in "Spooks Run Wild". However, there is a pretty waitress in the town's diner that they would like to have a date with, so they sneak away from the camp at night-time and one of them is shot by the caretaker of the local cemetery which forces the boys to take refuge in Lugosi's creepy hillside manor. There has been a killer on the loose and the boys naturally think that Lugosi is the killer and spend a nervous night meandering through his mansion trying to find their entranced friend who had been given a mild sedative. Nice film and the first of the East Side Kids film to feature Huntz Hall. The films studio, Monogram, reunited Lugosi and the East Side Kids two years later in the less entertaining "Ghosts on the Loose". Hall's line in "Spooks Run Wild" pertaining to his wearing a suit of armor: "My tailor told me it would wear like iron" is absolutely hilarious!