Director – Edward [L.] Bernds, Screenplay – Edward Bernds & Elwood Ullman, Producer – Ben Schwalb, Photography (b&w) – Harry Neumann, Special Effects – Augie Lohman, Art Direction – David Milton. Production Company – Allied Artists Pictures Corporation.
Cast
Leo Gorcey (Terence ‘Slip’ Mahoney), Huntz Hall (Sach Jones), Bernard Gorcey (Louie Dumbrowsky), John Dehner (Derek Gravesend), Lloyd Corrigan (Anton Gravesend), Ellen Corby (Amelia Gravesend), Laura Mason (Francine Gravesend), Paul Wexler (Grissom), David Condon (Chuck), Bennie Bartlett (Butch)
Plot
After a baseball thrown by kids breaks the window of Louie Dumbrowsky’s diner, Slip Mahoney gets the idea of using a vacant lot near Gravesend Manor in Long Island for the kids to play in. He contacts the Gravesend family to ask permission and is invited out to the manor. He and his friend Sach travel there and are welcomed in. The two Gravesend brothers are scientists who eagerly seek Slip and Sach as subjects for their experiments – one to transplant a mind into a robot they have built, the other to place a human brain in a gorilla body. Meanwhile, the vampire family member Francine wants one of the boys, while the sister Amelia seeks to feed the other to her man-eating plant.
The Bowery Boys were a comedy team who enjoyed popular appeal throughout the 1940s and 1950s. The group started as The East Side Kids, a serious attempt to portray juvenile delinquency in Sidney Kingsley’s play Dead End (1935) and this was filmed in 1937, after which various of the actors went on to play similar characters in various dramas. The group was relaunched at low-budget studio Monogram as The East End Kids and appeared in 22 cheap films beginning with East Side Kids (1940) where their exploits were played for comedy. Lead player Leo Gorcey took control of the series in 1946 and rechristened them The Bowery Boys (named after a notorious 19th Century street gang) for a further 48 pictures at Allied Artists before the series ended in 1958. The complement of the gang changed considerably through their various incarnations, although the most famous of the faces were Huntz Hall and the gang’s leader Leo Gorcey.
Several of the Bowery Boys’ comedies ventured into genre material with the likes of the ghost comedies Spooks Run Wild (1941), Ghosts on the Loose (1943), Spook Busters (1946), Ghost Chasers (1951) and Spook Chasers (1957), and other efforts that contain genre elements such as Master Minds (1949), Jalopy (1953), Paris Playboys (1954), Bowery to Bagdad (1955), Hold That Hypnotist (1957) and Up in Smoke (1957).
Unlike Abbott and Costello, the Bowery Boys didn’t have Universal Studios’ backlog of monster movies from the 1930s and 40s (Frankenstein, Dracula, The Invisible Man and The Mummy) to draw on and are forced to come up with their own. Here we get a crazed melange involving mad scientists variously trying to transfer Leo and Huntz’s brains into the body of a robot and an ape, both of which go amok in the laboratory; the old dear trying to feed one of the boys to her man-eating plant; and a member of the family who would also appear to be a vampire. In is noted how these often seem to resemble The Addams Family – Laura Mason as the Morticia-like woman who appears to be a vampire, while Paul Wexler’s butler could well have served as the model for Ted Cassidy’s Lurch when it came to the tv series The Addams Family (1964-6) a decade later.
By this point, the Bowery Boys have been whittled down to being just Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall, as well as Leo’s father Bernard. Leo Gorcey’s malapropisms come with such machine-gun rapidity that it is hard to keep up with all of them:- “I could never figure out how to contact people as influenza as they are,” “are you going to coagulate with us?” “A benefracture of humanity,” “We’ll have to draw up certain officious documents,” “entrance the value of your property” or references to a ‘masuelinoleum’ or being taken on a ‘Crook’s Tour’ of the manor. Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall bounce off one another with polished routines about earmuffs and snoring and recycled routines – “How can you read in the dark?” “I went to night school.”
The Bowery Boys Meet the Monsters actually ends up being the first Bowery Boys comedy I have liked. The comedy is lighting paced and constantly switching from one routine and one subplot to another – the film only runs to 65 minutes, which is probably a good thing in that too much more running around the house would have been exhausting. Nevertheless, it is one Bowery Boys outing that comes with a great deal of madcap vigour.
