Spooks Run Wild (Phil Rosen, 1941)

Spooks Run Wild is a bad movie, a horror-comedy neither scary nor funny, a cheap production that, intentionally or not, saved money on film and lighting equipment by arranging the characters side by side in the majority of shots and letting some scenes play out in indiscernible darkness. Nevertheless, there's an endearing quality to the cheapness and incompetence, and I am never going to be mad about Bela Lugosi and Angelo Rossitto doing their thing in a spooky mansion. Still, I can only recommend this one to the hardcore Lugosi-heads.

I also feel some affection for the movie because scenes from it appeared in Horrible Horror, a VHS compilation of b-movie sci-fi and horror clips and trailers from the '30s through the '60s hosted by Zacherley, "the Cool Ghoul," which I received as a Christmas gift in fifth or sixth grade and watched at least 800 times. I already talked about that VHS compilation in my King of the Zombies post in April. (I claimed to have watched it 37,000 times in that post, but I've gotta come clean. It's closer to 800.) I was never able to properly learn geometry because so many scenes from Horrible Horror took up permanent residence in my brain. There was simply no room to introduce any trapezoid knowledge without evicting the trailer for The Alligator Man, and I wasn't going to let that happen ("I'll kill you, alligator man! Just like I'd kill any four-legged gator!").

Spooks Run Wild brings together Bela Lugosi (bounced from Hollywood to the Poverty Row circuit when his drug and alcohol problems became a studio liability) and the wisecracking, streetwise East Side Kids, who may need an introduction in 2026. In 1935, a Broadway play called Dead End, about Depression-era New York City street kids getting a second chance in reform school, became a huge hit. Hollywood producers saw dollar signs and turned the play into a movie. The movie was a hit, too, and the cast of young men became a '30s Hollywood franchise called the Dead End Kids (after a two-film rebranding as the Crime School Kids), with the series of movies quickly evolving from gritty dramas to goofy comedies of misadventure. Some of the original Dead End Kids appeared in their own imitation group, the Little Tough Guys, who had a similar run of movies from the late '30s into the early '40s. In 1940, low-budget Poverty Row studio Monogram Pictures got in on the action and created a copycat gang called the East Side Kids. Eventually, some of the Dead End Kids became East Side Kids after the Hollywood output slowed, and the trend continued in the low-budget world into the '50s, with the East Side Kids morphing into the Bowery Boys in the late '40s. By the time the last Bowery Boys movie hit theaters in the late '50s, the scoreboard tallied one Broadway play, 89 films, and three serials, not even including other copycat ensembles such as the Gas House Kids and the Harlem Tuff Kids. Yowzah!

In Spooks Run Wild, the East Side Kids play a group of underprivileged NYC teens (though the youngest of them looks to be in at least his mid-twenties) on their way to a character-building wilderness camp in upstate New York (filmed on Monogram's sets in Los Angeles), under the supervision of engaged couple Jeff Dixon (Dave O'Brien), a condescending pipe-smoking law student, and Linda Mason (Dorothy Short), a plucky can-do nurse. Linda's too good for milquetoast dweeb Jeff, but what can you do? (O'Brien and Short were a real-life married couple, and they also acted together in Reefer Madness.) Jeff and Linda are the only characters with run-of-the-mill names (no offense to the Jeffs and Lindas of the world), with the exception of East Sider Danny (Bobby Jordan). The rest of our East Side gang includes Muggs (Leo Gorcey), Glimpy (Huntz Hall), Scruno (Sunshine Sammy Morrison, also a former Our Gang cast member), Peewee (David Gorcey, Leo's younger brother), and Skinny (Donald Haines).

When the bus driver transporting our characters stops in a small town near the camp to take a break and check the tires, the Kids play a prank on the driver, get yelled at by pipe-smokin' Jeff, and wander off to a soda counter, where they hit on the clerk Margie (Rosemary Portia) and hear a radio alert about a serial murderer on the run in the area. They brush it off, but the tough-guy act fails to convince.

Back at the camp and bedding down for the night, the Kids decide to sneak out and meet up with Margie. Their route will take them through a cemetery. Much of this will be too dark to see. It's like watching a radio play in certain scenes, I tell ya. Meanwhile, an odd man with the fantastic name of Nardo (Bela Lugosi) and his little person assistant Luigi (Angelo Rossitto) stop at a gas station for directions to an abandoned creepy mansion Nardo has inherited. The horror-obsessed gas station owner Lem Harvey (P.J. Kelly) knows he's looking at the murderer, but he plays it cool. He also recognizes his next customer, Dr. Von Grosch (Dennis Moore), from his occult reading material. The doctor tells Lem to keep his identity secret because he's on Nardo's trail.

Back to our dimly lit late-night wanderings. When Peewee gets hit with buckshot by a spooked cemetery caretaker who's already witnessed Nardo and Luigi disappear in front of his eyes, the other Kids carry him to Nardo's spooky mansion for help. Spooky stuff that's not that spooky occurs. Comedy that's not that funny also occurs, but I do love the way Lugosi says "Helloooo" and "Gooodbyyyye" and the way a skull prop bounces off his head during a pratfall.

The movie picks up whenever Lugosi and Rossitto are onscreen, and Kelly and Morrison also get a few decent moments, but this is otherwise pretty generic stuff, mostly poorly done, though even the weakest 20th century movie increases in interest for me the deeper we descend into our 21st century big tech hell. I also got a laugh out of the lack of urgency Jeff and the local constable show for the missing fish-out-of-water East Side Kids and Linda (who went off to look for the gang when Jeff was more interested in smoking his pipe and uttering condescending dismissals of Linda's concern) while a twisted serial murderer is roaming the same stretch of countryside. These guys do not want to get out of their chairs.

Well, there you have it. Spooks Run Wild. It's a movie (barely), but there aren't many spooks, and they could have run a whole lot wilder. I'll leave you with some Nebraska talk. Almost everyone in the East Side Kids cast was a native New Yorker except for Morrison (from New Orleans) and Haines, who hailed from my home state of Nebraska. He was born in Seward County, but his family moved to southern California when he was eight in search of work. He became a successful child actor beginning in the silent era, and Spooks Run Wild was his final movie. Enlisting in the military after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Haines was killed in action in Tunisia in 1943. Though he was only 23 when he died, Haines had at least 92 film credits. Film production workdays can be pretty nuts, but movie people in the '20s, '30, and '40s worked freakishly inhuman schedules.

Keeping the Nebraska connections flowing, it's time for some Angelo Rossitto talk. Rossitto, whose acting career stretched from the silent film The Beloved Rogue in 1927 to a 1987 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (he died in 1991), was born and raised in Omaha. Some notable credits in his lengthy acting career (he also owned a Hollywood newsstand to keep a steady income going between acting gigs) include Seven Footprints to Satan, Freaks, The Wizard of Oz (he was one of the Munchkins), Hellzapoppin', Samson and Delilah, The Baron of Arizona, Confessions of an Opium Eater, Requiem for a Heavyweight, The Trip, Brain of Blood (OK, that one may be notable only to me), The Other, a Rockford Files episode, the animated Lord of the Rings, The Dark, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Orson Welles' The Other Side of the Wind (filmed in the '70s and finally released in 2018), the front cover of Tom Waits' Swordfishtrombones album, and the back cover of Bob Dylan & The Band's The Basement Tapes. Another wild Nebraska-related fact about Rossitto is that his granddaughter is married to my preschool teacher's oldest son who moved from Nebraska to Hollywood to try to make it as an actor but, Seinfeld episode aside, ended up building a career as a propmaker for movies and TV shows. I did some benign Internet stalking to see what he was up to after reading his mom's obituary in my hometown paper (she was a great preschool teacher, by the way, and a very nice woman). It looks like he's retired from the film industry now and teaching jiujitsu in Hawaii. Some people know how to live.

Die Sister, Die! (Randall Hood, 1978)

Die Sister, Die! is a quiet (except for a couple of nutty dream sequences), character-based, psychological horror/thriller that may disappoint you if you need the walls to be painted red, but the strong performances, aesthetically pleasing locations, relaxed pace, and complex and morally ambiguous characters really worked for me. I had a good time with this one.

For such a straightforward little movie with a small cast, Die Sister, Die! had a difficult, drawn-out production. Filming began in 1972, but financial difficulties and the cancer diagnosis of director Randall Hood slowed things down. More filming took place in the mid-'70s (the cars in the movie are mostly '75 and '76 models), but Hood died, aged 48, in 1976 before any post-production work could be done. One of the film's three leads, Jack Ging, made it his mission to turn the unedited footage into a finished product, and the movie was finally completed and released in 1978. Clint Eastwood, a friend of Ging's, is rumored to have helped with the film's completion, but that rumor has been neither confirmed nor denied. Despite the production troubles and Hood's health problems, the movie is consistent in tone and performance and doesn't look like a stop/start affair.

The movie opens with the wealthy Amanda Price (Edith Atwater) attempting suicide in her very distinctive-looking home (the Piru Mansion, more on that location later). Her doctor, Thorne (Kent Smith, Atwater's real-life husband), and her brother, Edward (Jack Ging), save her, which inspires only hatred from Amanda toward Edward. The doctor tries to get to the bottom of the siblings' enmity and the reasons for Amanda's multiple suicide attempts from an evasive Edward but fails. Dr. Thorne also fails to convince Edward to have his suicidal sister institutionalized, but Edward is open to the idea of paying for a live-in nurse.

A cocky Edward stops by a dive bar called Hank's to enlist the services of former nurse-turned-waitress Esther Harper (Antoinette Bower). Esther was a live-in nurse for an elderly millionaire whose family neglected him. Angry at his family and appreciative of Esther's help, the rich old man married Esther so she'd inherit his dough, but the family successfully stopped the will in court after the old man's death. The bad publicity forced Esther out of the nursing profession. Edward lets her know he knows all about her past and offers her the chance to make some big bucks. She's reluctant, but he leaves his card.

Esther shows up a few days later at Edward's office to get more information about the job. He gives it to her straight. He'll pay Esther a standard nurse's salary to look after Amanda and report back to him about whatever his sister tells her. There are some embarrassing family secrets he doesn't want the outside world to learn, you see. He then drops the bomb, though Esther already knows the score and is not surprised at what she's hearing. Edward tells her not to intervene when, not if, his sister attempts suicide again. Don't help her, don't save her, let her die. Once his sister is dead, Esther will get a $25,000 payment. She accepts the job.

Esther gets more of the family dirt from Amanda and the housekeeper, Mrs. Gonzalez (Rita Conde), once inside the mansion. The late Price patriarch, James Lendon (played in flashbacks and dream sequences by Robert Emhardt), still staring haughtily and imposingly down at his family from a huge portrait on the wall, doted on spoiled youngest sibling Nell (Peg Shirley) and despised his other two children, Amanda and Edward, who despised James and Nell right back. After the old man's death from a heart attack, Nell disappeared to Europe, never to be seen again. She even skipped the funeral. Not suspicious at all. Amanda inherited the mansion and gained control of the dispersal of funds, putting her brother Edward on a healthy but fixed income so he wouldn't blow the entire fortune. With Nell out of the picture, Amanda and Edward decided to despise each other, too, and Amanda became a depressive recluse, barely leaving the mansion.

This is where we're at when Esther meets Amanda. The two women don't trust each other, but a slowly growing oddball mutual admiration society eventually develops. Is Esther really going to help Edward let Amanda die, or is she going to form an alliance with Amanda? Maybe she'll double-cross both of them? What is Edward's real goal, and does he plan to do more than wait for Amanda to kill herself? Will he kill Esther, too? What really happened to Nell and James? We in the audience and pretty much every other character already know that Edward is a greedy and conniving guy who wants his sister dead, but we don't know what else he's up to, and Esther's and Amanda's motivations are also murky and unknowable. None of the characters trust each other, all of them have secrets, and the audience is never sure of anyone's motives or plans, other than Edward's obvious ones. I love these kinds of stories, and the cast members, made up of veteran actors with much theater, episodic television, and character actor and day player film experience, deliver naturalistic, understated performances that kept me invested.

The location shooting also contributes to the movie's flavor. The dive bar, Edward's office, a nearby Catholic church, a late-night diner, all these places are complementary to the film's tone, but the mansion itself is the star of the show. The Piru Mansion (also called the Newhall Mansion and the Cook Mansion) is a Queen Anne-style Victorian mansion in the small town of Piru, California, about 48 miles from downtown Los Angeles. The crazily distinctive home, built in 1886 by a wealthy fundamentalist Christian businessman from Illinois attempting to create a second Garden of Eden, sold to two more wealthy families over the ensuing years, entirely rebuilt in 1982-3 after a devastating 1981 fire, and currently owned by a private investment company that rents it out for events, corporate retreats, and vacations, pops up frequently in movies and TV shows. Before Die Sister, Die!, my most recent sighting of the mansion was in the absolutely bonkers 1973 drive-in exploitation movie Pets, and it's also appeared in Desert Fury, Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, Terror at Red Wolf Inn, and episodes of Charlie's Angels, Mannix, Fantasy Island, Hart to Hart, The Incredible Hulk, Highway to Heaven, Murder, She Wrote, Melrose Place, The X-Files, and Monk. A new Garden of Eden, indeed.

The hardcore horror nerds may not be wild about Die Sister, Die!, but I truly enjoyed its performances, '70s locations, morally dubious characters, and low-key charm. It's somewhere between a Columbo episode and a Tales from the Crypt morality play of comeuppance, and I like hanging out in that space.